Supply chain challenges, ongoing for over a year and worsening, are prompting customers to optimize existing infrastructure rather than expand. RapidScale, interested in growing a Red Hat practice, uses its FinOps capabilities to help clients move to the cloud or upgrade to more cost-efficient products. These conversations also reveal full application inventories across public, private, or on-premises environments, opening doors to broader advisory and revenue opportunities.
Customers are delaying hardware decisions and seeking provider help. RapidScale proactively purchased compute infrastructure in late 2025 and early 2026 to hedge against price increases, allowing it to serve clients without raising prices. Project scopes have shrunk—for example, from full data center refreshes to a few applications—due to inflated costs. Full-scale public cloud migrations or CapEx-to-OpEx shifts have not been widespread in the current environment.
While IBM views its issues as short-term, AI tools are leading some customers to explore replacing traditional infrastructure, including decades-old mainframes. Analyst reports from Bank of America and Bernstein suggest broader impacts, including potential lowered software growth expectations, infrastructure declines, reduced free cash flow, and decreased mainframe capacity plans among CIOs. RapidScale has reorganized into advisory, implementation, and managed services for a full-stack offering, shifting from 100% recurring managed services to a 70-30 mix with professional services.