Survey: AI Spurring Increased Adoption of Containers
A global survey of 1,600 cloud, IT, and engineering executives published today finds a full 87% expect their organizations’ reliance on containers to deploy applications to increase over the next three years, with 83% reporting they are already building new applications in containers.
Conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of Nutanix, 85% of respondents also said they believe artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating adoption of containers, with 59% reporting they anticipate their organization will have more than five AI-enabled applications in the next three years. However, 82% also noted their current IT infrastructure is not fully ready to support those applications.
Lee Caswell, senior vice president of product and solutions marketing at Nutanix, said the survey makes it clear that while AI is clearly spurring additional adoption of containers, the pace at which organizations are deploying those applications appears to be deliberate.
In general, IT organizations have historically always pursued a slow but steady approach to building and deploying an emerging technology, and despite its inherent potential, AI applications may be no different.
For example, 58% of respondents anticipate that AI agents will improve productivity and efficiency. Additionally, 57% see a potential for AI agents to create new products, services, or revenue streams, while 61% expect AI agents to enhance customer or employee experiences.
However, the survey also makes it clear there are significant AI challenges that still need to be addressed. Well over three-quarters (79%) said they encounter AI applications or agents being implemented by employees in non-IT functions. A full 87% believe unauthorized AI use introduces risk, including exposure of sensitive data and intellectual property.
Additionally, 82% noted that silos between business units and IT make it difficult to effectively execute technology initiatives, slowing deployment timelines and increasing complexity.
Finally, 80% of respondents said data sovereignty is a high priority when making infrastructure decisions, with well over 57% believing they will need to run their infrastructure within a single country either in an on-premises IT environment or a specific region of a cloud service. Many organizations are also now trying to better assess the total cost of the tokens that would need to be consumed when deploying an AI application in the cloud, noted Caswell.
There will, of course, come a day when the number of container applications will exceed the number of legacy applications that were originally deployed on virtual machines. Nutanix is making a case for a platform that enables IT teams to consolidate the deployment of those applications on top of a virtual machine that isolates those workloads.
The challenge, as always, is overcoming the significant amount of inertia that usually exists within IT organizations that tend to be risk adverse, especially when it comes to moving applications from a platform that is perceived to be running, within acceptable parameters, an existing application.
Of course, there are a number of factors that can impact those decisions, not the least of which is a sudden rise in virtual machine licensing costs following the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. Regardless of the motivation, however, the one constant is enterprise IT teams are not inclined to make rash decisions no matter what class of applications are being deployed.
