Expedient Cloud Service Provider Sells Outcomes Over Science Projects

October 21st, 2026 | Jason Lopez | 7:56

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Expedient’s Anthony Jackman says cloud service providers can turn VMware, AI and cloud repatriation pressures into opportunity by selling managed outcomes, not one-off science projects.

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Podcast transcript:

Anthony Jackman: 2025 was viewed as like the year of the frozen deal that just never happened. The customer didn’t decide I’m not doing this, they just were waiting. I think what that gave everybody was a year to really think through what they wanted and to strategize. This year everything seems to have picked back up even in the face of the rapidly increasing costs. I do see customers finally making a change and I think that that’s going to continue.

Jason Lopez: Anthony Jackman is the Chief Innovation Officer of Expedient, an IT provider running 15 data centers in the U.S. This is the Tech Barometer Podcast. I’m Jason Lopez.

Anthony Jackman: It has been a very great year for us so far, but it’s also a very challenging time because a lot of change is happening.

Jason Lopez: For years, the question of how a ran its data center had one default answer, VMware. It integrated with everything and IT departments built their entire operating model around it. Jackman has watched that certainty unravel from the inside.

Anthony Jackman: The thing that was consistent is that we never had problems.

Jason Lopez: He’s talking about Nutanix, which he first brought into Expedient a decade ago, not as a replacement for VMware, but as a storage layer underneath it. The reliability record built over those years would matter later.

Anthony Jackman: We just never had that with Nutanix. That’s what gave us the confidence to move forward with AHV as a hypervisor and we did that a number of years ago and now it’s growing very fast. We do a lot of AHV private cloud at this point.

Jason Lopez: That growth has accelerated, not because Expedient went looking for it, but because the VMware world changed and clients came looking for them.

Anthony Jackman: I don’t know what I would compare it to because it was a lot of things at once. It was first and foremost a business challenge, but it was a business challenge that brought technical challenges along with it.

Jason Lopez: Jackman says the clients who came to Expedient weren’t necessarily angry at VMware’s technology. The technology, he says, is still good. What changed was how it gets sold and what customers are now required to buy.

Anthony Jackman: A lot of people saw what were perceived to be very large price increases. In reality, it wasn’t necessarily a price increase for a given thing. It was that we don’t sell that thing anymore. We sell this big package and at least within our client base, the bulk of them don’t use most of those features. Now, when they come run on our cloud, they do because we’ve baked all those things in to just work well.

Jason Lopez: That distinction between buying a package and consuming a service is central to how Expedient positions itself. It’s an ROI proposition.

Anthony Jackman: We’re a full service provider, so everything we do is very integrated. It’s the compute, backups, disaster recovery, networking, and security services, and then the human team that goes along with it so that our customers are buying an outcome and not buying a science project.

Jason Lopez: For clients who wanted to stay with VMware but needed a different operating model, Expedient offers that. For clients who wanted something else entirely, Expedient offers that too through its partnership with Nutanix.

Anthony Jackman: They’re the ones that come knocking on our door saying, I like the cloud operating model. However, I don’t want to stay with VMware. I want something else. Fortunately for us, we have a very strong partnership with Nutanix. We’re very good at it. We support the entire stack and we do it at large scale. We’ve been doing it for years. The confidence level is there for those clients.

Jason Lopez: But the decision between platforms is never simple. For most clients, Jackman says, what they’re really evaluating is how much change they can absorb and what capabilities they can’t live without.

Anthony Jackman: The truth is most of these clients have to learn something new regardless because some solutions just aren’t even possible anymore. For the ones that want to look at something else, we can offer them the integrated Nutanix platform, which is very easy to use. And they get the advantage of a lot of the newer capabilities with a relatively small uplift in how much they have to learn. And obviously, we’re there to help them. We are a full service provider. So the ones that really don’t want to learn much new, they can just rely on us. But I think most customers like to have a little bit of control over what’s happening in their environment.

Jason Lopez: That shift away from open integrations and closed ecosystems is pushing clients to reconsider the whole stack, and AI is pressing on that reconsideration even harder.

Anthony Jackman: I think one that’s kind of high up on the list is network security, which historically was difficult to do, required a lot of products, required a lot of thought. And that’s something that they could take advantage of in the Nutanix platform because it’s very integrated to do micro-segmentation and to get visualization and observability into what’s happening in your network. And security is just becoming more and more important. Every year, security becomes more important than it was before. And AI is definitely pressing on that even harder.

Jason Lopez: Meanwhile, Expedient itself has been rebuilding its own infrastructure for what’s coming. 15 data centers standardized to look identical from a network perspective and a shift in how Nutanix fits into the picture.

Anthony Jackman: It’s funny, we started with Nutanix as a storage platform. Now what we’re primarily driving is Nutanix as a compute platform using external storage. And it’s not because we don’t like the Nutanix storage, it’s great. But as a provider at our scale, hyper-converged storage can come with some challenges because we don’t operate 10 or 20 hosts, we operate thousands of hosts. So now we have a unified storage layer and I can buy one type of host and I can use it for VMware or Nutanix and we’re not moving things around racks.

Jason Lopez: And then there’s the edge. Manufacturing plants, remote facilities, anywhere that IT going down for five minutes could shut down a plant for a day.

Anthony Jackman: We have manufacturing clients that if IT goes down for five minutes, the plant could be down for a day or multiple days and cost them millions of dollars. So it’s very mission critical and it has to live in their four walls. So we basically package up an expedient private cloud in a small, resilient, rugged box, drop it in their data center. And to us, it looks like it’s in our four walls. So we manage it the same way we manage everything else. It just happens to be living somewhere else.

Jason Lopez: The year of uncertainty that froze so many decisions in 2025 has given way to something different. Jackman says clients who spent that year thinking are now moving.

Anthony Jackman: The customer didn’t decide I’m not doing this. They just were waiting. I think what that gave everybody was a year to really think through what they wanted and to strategize. And then this year, everything seems to have picked back up, even in the face of the rapidly increasing costs, specifically hardware. I do see customers finally making a change, and I think that that’s going to continue.

Jason Lopez: Anthony Jackman is the chief innovation officer at Expedient. This is the Tech Barometer podcast, a production of The Forecast by Nutanix. I’m Jason Lopez. For more stories on technology and the people in tech, visit theforecastbynutanix.com.