Tech supply chain stress at every level
Carl Black, Sourcing Manager
It feels like every year we’re talking about the stress the technology supply chain is under - and 2026 is no different.
Every part of the technology value chain from electricity, to raw materials, to manufacturing, to skilled people is under more stress than ever before. Why?
Nothing works without electricity and the pressure that the electricity supply is under from data centre demands is real. OpenAI’s signed partnerships with Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia and more require a total of 30 gigawatts of new power generation to deliver. That’s the equivalent of 80,000 acres of Solar Farms.
In the hardware business, memory prices are exploding as production limitations bite. There are three manufacturers of high-grade silicon wafers, the base material for memory and flash storage, globally. Solar energy is competing for the same precursors as silicon wafers, and it’s not like we can bring more supply on quickly.
There are huge barriers to entry both in capital investment and time in this process – and that’s before you worry about the high-quality production needed to produce enterprise-grade memory chips. This shortage is unlikely to resolve any time soon and will drive up prices of everything from end-user devices to storage to high-performance compute.
Given the concerns about AI taking people’s jobs, it’s ironic that we continue to face major skills shortages across Australasia in the technology industry. The Australian technology labour market projects to be short 370,000 people in 2026, and New Zealand’s skilled sectors are under stress from high levels of outward migration.
Why does this supply chain stress matter? In a world where business is becoming more and more agile, we are increasingly reliant on flexible and available supply chains. They enable us to buy what we need, when we need it, without a huge amount of forward planning.
If you’re waiting for the supply chain pressure to ease – think again. This is the new normal. Businesses need to plan accordingly.
Vendor hype goes to the next level – if that’s even possible
Simon Walker, Chief Strategy & Revenue Officer
If separating what was real from what was hype was hard enough in 2025, expect it to be even harder in 2026.
The big winners from the explosion in .ai domain names: Anguilla, 100 square kilometres of Carribean island paradise. It’s their Top-level Domain.
The addition of AI to everything (in marketing, at least) has made everyone else’s life harder, though. Unfortunately, the bets that have been made are big – and big bets mean high stakes. In 2026, “AI” startups and enterprise vendors will continue to make it hard for technology buyers to understand what’s real and what’s vapourware.
Whether it’s AI-washing (big claims about AI-powered products), automation tools rebranded as AI, or what we call overstated autonomy (supposedly independent AI agents that actually can’t function without significant human supervision), AI marketing material will be full of bold claims that are the buyers’ responsibility to validate in 2026.
AI customers have already reported “lower than expected” automation levels from AI purchases made in previous years. Furthermore, US regulators are pursuing cases against companies that have allegedly been “AI-washing” – making deceptive claims about what their products can and can’t do.
In such a rapidly evolving market, expect this behaviour to continue. It’s not just startups either – Salesforce’s struggles with their flagship AI product, Agentforce, have been well documented.
IT buyers – expect even more confusion in 2026. Buying cycles will slow as vendor assessment gets tougher – potentially slowing down business value.
Trusted advisors with a deep understanding of your business context will be more important than ever to lean on to navigate through this environment.
Hybrid cloud: Next big thing or too hard basket?
Simon Walker, Chief Strategy & Revenue Officer
Hybrid cloud has been touted as the final step in businesses’ cloud transformation journeys for a number of years now. Major infrastructure and software vendors alongside systems integrators have been pushing hybrid cloud as the silver bullet that solves every problem in your on-premise or public cloud environments – Systems Advisory Services included.
Why? At face value, hybrid cloud solves a wide range of business challenges that 100% on-premise or 100% public cloud architectures grapple with. It balances the need for flexibility with the control of an owned environment, provides sovereignty without losing access to innovation, delivers much more flexibility around cost management, and prevents single vendor lock-in.
However, getting there hasn’t been as easy as the businesses promoting hybrid would have liked – and this will continue in 2026.
No matter how much vendors extol the urgency of hybrid transformation, most organisations have a wide range of competing IT priorities. Many of these are far more visible fires than the gradual technical debt building in an on-premise environment or the major business risk of renting your data off a hyperscaler.
When core systems aren’t architected for flexibility and portability, the hill to climb to get to a hybrid world is significant – and with budgets fully deployed as soon as they’re set, the appetite for change is low.
Hybrid will remain a long term focus for businesses – but as much as Fortune 500 CEOs would like, the floodgates won’t open in 2026. Instead, we’ll see businesses who take a gradual and intentional approach to hybrid win – rather than those who look for one-off silver bullets.
FinOps becomes an essential discipline rather than a nice to have
Carl Black, Sourcing Manager
Mark Andrews, Solutions Architect
Adoption of AI in organisations is increasing rapidly. Alongside this growth: cloud compute bill-shock hitting new heights. Often, businesses have taken ad-hoc approach to FinOps (FinancialOperations) – turning it into a “when I can” task rather than an operational discipline.
Without FinOps monitoring costs, AI projects and other cloud-driven innovation quickly become black holes of spending, killing progress before delivering any real value.
As Dan Wilkinson, CIO at MTF says, a committed and dedicated cost management discipline is needed across the entire technology organisation to limit unnecessary cloud spend.
Real-time cost monitoring helps businesses understand spending as it happens, instead of waiting until there’s no budget left and no project delivered. AI delivers the most value when it’s properly governed – both from a risk perspective and a cost perspective. Having clear guardrails and accountabilities from day one will also drive cost out.
Discipline around cost equals results – as MTF have attested to. Commitment to cost discipline frees up budget for solving other IT problems – and with free budget hard to find in 2026, expect businesses to focus on FinOps discipline for quick wins.
Containers are taking over everywhere
Ian Hayton, Enterprise Architect
We expect to see a substantial and rapid shift from traditional virtual machines toward containerisation.
Container adoption has hit over 90% for new workloads in many enterprises often driven by data sovereignty requirements, cost optimisation requirements, and the ongoing desire for better infrastructure control.
This shift has been propelled by public cloud providers who are enable developers to iterate rapidly, without needing to manage any underlying compute, storage and networking resources. Those who embrace this shift early are likely to benefit from improved agility and efficiency in their workloads.
What’s driving this trend?
- Public cloud momentum continues to drive developer preference for containers due to speed, portability and abstraction from infrastructure.
- On-premise adoption is accelerating, fuelled by hybrid/multi-cloud strategies, cost pressures, data sovereignty requirements and repatriation trends (with many organisations moving select workloads back from public clouds).
- Modern platforms increasingly unify VMs and containers under a single management layer (e.g. Kubernetes supporting both via tools like OpenShift Virtualisation), allowing gradual modernisation without wholesale replacement.
- Enterprises are prioritising consistent operations across environments, with containers enabling better scalability, automation and governance especially for AI workloads alongside traditional applications.
The AI investment boom continues while businesses struggle to determine value
Simon Walker, Chief Strategy & Revenue Officer
95% of AI Proof-of-Concepts fail. It’s a statistic burned into the brain of anyone who’s attended a technology industry conference in the last two years.
So how does an industry that delivers value 5% of the time continue to attract more and more investment while customers struggle to derive value from the product?
The partnerships being signed between AI leaders (OpenAI, Anthropic), tech behemoths (Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle), infrastructure companies and more are driving investment in AI to previously unseen heights.
2026 will be the year where this continues, while businesses continue to be challenged to find real value.
The reality is that the opportunities for business value are real, and unignorable. As businesses get better at understanding what’s important for them with AI, and start focusing on real business value, we’ll see more successful AI deployments – which will drive further investment in the technology.
Future AI demand indicators such as token demand and the share prices of Palantir and Accenture are strong and show no signs of abating. The market’s ability to absorb speed bumps shows resilience in investor belief – which will continue to support major capital investments.
What does this mean for you? As much as we all want a breather, the arms race continues. Businesses need to move fast to stay relevant – even if business value is unclear today. An experimental, lean-startup style approach is essential for teams looking to move fast and learn faster.
Counterpoint: the AI bubble pops but it’s impact is enduring:
Ernst Du Toit, Technology Lead
The AI hangover is starting.
While the AI hype party is still going, some are waking up to the headache of the costs of investing in AI. This pattern is similar to the dot-com bubble, or even the US railway buildout bubble of the late 19th century.
The bursting of these bubbles bankrupted those investing in the cycle, but the buildout fuelled the growth of new industries for the following decades.
These new industries changed the world, and that will be the enduring impact of AI.
AI Is Reshaping Digital Risk
Mark Andrews, Solutions Architect
AI is fundamentally changing cybersecurity in all directions, helping organisations defend themselves against threats but also creating new attack paths.
A recent IBM article highlights AI agents and unsanctioned “shadow AI” tools are increasing the risk of data and intellectual property breaches.
Identity is on its way to becoming the main battleground of digital risk, with the evolution of deepfakes, biometric spoofing and AI models adding pressure on traditional access control solutions.
We’re starting to see security built into AI systems during the initial build stage rather than adding it at a later time. As AI evolves organisations need to stay ahead of encryption changes and be confident, they understand and control how their AI behaves. Clear governance frameworks and human oversight are needed throughout the process.
The only constant is change and 2026 will be no exception. Some of this change will be rapid and some will be so slow it’s hard to see happening – but it is happening. Deep understanding and trusted advisors around you can help you be ready to embrace change instead of seeing your plans stymied.
