CEOs From AMD, Cisco, Dell, IBM, HPE And More Explain Toughest Customer Challenges In 2025
The CEOs from AMD, Cisco, Dell, Extreme Networks, HPE, Lenovo, NetApp, Nutanix, IBM and Red Hat explain what the toughest customer challenges will be in 2025.
“In 2025, businesses will continue to grapple with AI adoption, surging data volumes and an evolving workforce,” said Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell. “Customers need solutions that remove complexity so they can focus on their core mission.”
For many technology leaders running enormous IT companies, such as IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna, proving to customers of all shapes and sizes that artificial intelligence is worth the risk and cost is top of mind this year.
“For customers, demonstrating significant ROI from AI will be essential to building the institutional confidence to scale the technology across their business,” said Krishna. “Company leaders must be willing to change and move with this disruption.”
Other CEOs, like Nutanix’s Rajiv Ramaswami, see the biggest customer challenges in 2025 as an opportunity.
“Many VMware customers have concerns about pricing, lack of support, and a decreased focus on innovation,” said Ramaswami. “As customers are seeking to modernize their IT infrastructure, the decision to migrate away from VMware is well-timed as it provides an opportunity to future-proof their application strategies, especially as technologies like GenAI take hold.”
As part of CRN’s 2025 CEO Outlook special report, leaders from some of the largest tech companies on the planet weigh in on the toughest challenges they expect their customers to face in 2025.
Combined, these CEOs have centuries of leadership experience and decades of knowledge of how to successfully transition through the biggest challenges in the IT world.
CEO participants include:
- AMD CEO Lisa Su
- Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins
- HPE CEO Antonio Neri
- NetApp CEO George Kurian
- Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami
- Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang
- Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks
- Extreme Networks CEO Ed Meyercord
- IBM CEO Arvind Krishna
- Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell
Here are the answers of 10 of the world’s most important CEOs when asked the question, ‘What do you see as the toughest challenges facing customers in 2025?’
NetApp
CEO: George Kurian
NetApp Tenure: 14 Years
Has Been NetApp CEO For: 10 Years
As businesses look to further leverage AI, they'll realize a simple truth: at its core, AI is a method to analyze data, and the scope and quality of that data is paramount.
The challenge of implementing AI has rapidly moved from problems with the algorithms to issues with the data – finding and selecting the data needed to build an application that uses AI to make accurate predictions, governing sensitive data so an app can use AI to only provide the data that is appropriate for a given user and purpose, and ensuring data is fresh and accurate, so that the AI applications give customers correct information using the latest-breaking changes.
Those who look to best support their AI innovation by leveraging solutions that treat data challenges will come out on top. In addition, we believe that moving AI projects from lab to production, will require process redesign capabilities and change management skills.
Dell Technologies
CEO: Michael Dell
Dell Tenure: 41 Years
Has Been Dell CEO For: 41 Years
In 2025, businesses will continue to grapple with AI adoption, surging data volumes and an evolving workforce.
Customers need solutions that remove complexity so they can focus on their core mission. This is where collaboration with our trusted partner ecosystem will play a central role. By combining innovative technology with partners’ expertise, we will simplify adoption and offer flexible, scalable and secure solutions to address critical business needs.
IBM
CEO: Arvind Krishna
IBM Tenure: 34 Years
Has Been IBM CEO For: 5 Years
For customers, demonstrating significant ROI from AI will be essential to building the institutional confidence to scale the technology across their business.
As they scale, they can both improve productivity and begin to create new business models, new revenue streams, and drive enduring growth. The alignment between business strategy and technology strategy is a key priority — deciding what they want to do and then focusing tightly on the right use cases. With the correct strategy in place, they can better understand, map, and measure what the return on investment and value from AI will be. It’s also important to note that as AI becomes pervasive, job roles from entry level to the executive suite will change along with organizational structures and even entire industries.
Company leaders must be willing to change and move with this disruption. They must consider how to engage and bring their people on the journey, how to drive adoption, and how to give employees the skills, confidence and ability to use this technology in their work.
AMD
CEO: Lisa Su
AMD Tenure: 13 Years
Has Been AMD CEO For: 11 Years
The toughest challenge facing customers is the rapid pace of change. As technology advances, cutting-edge solutions like AI are essential to scaling business.
However, new technologies also bring significant complexity and the need for business process innovation. We are committed to working closely with partners to help customers leverage end-to-end AI and high-performance computing solutions to navigate these changes.
Nutanix
CEO: Rajiv Ramaswami
Nutanix Tenure: 5 Years
Has Been Nutanix CEO For: 5 Years
One of the toughest challenges facing our customers is around understanding how AI can deliver business value and effectively unlocking the ROI in AI initiatives.
Many organizations are working to bring strategic expectations around AI projects in line with budgets. Customers are also grappling with how to simplify how they run their applications and manage data in a hybrid multicloud world. Customers want deployment flexibility and one platform to run applications and data anywhere they need it, especially as IT complexity has continued to increase. Our software-defined architecture adapts to various hardware and cloud options to provide consistent operations and data services across cloud, edge, and core environments.
Lastly, we continue to hear from our customers that they are thinking through their strategy going forward to reduce their risk following the Broadcom acquisition. Many VMware customers have concerns about pricing, lack of support, and a decreased focus on innovation. As customers are seeking to modernize their IT infrastructure, the decision to migrate away from VMware is well-timed as it provides an opportunity to future-proof their application strategies, especially as technologies like GenAI take hold.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
CEO: Antonio Neri
HPE Tenure: 30 Years
Has Been HPE CEO For: 7 Years
Customers and partners will continue to explore AI use cases for their businesses with an increasing pressure to move from experimentation to adoption.
HPE and our partners are well positioned to help customers easily test proofs of concept and deploy them into production to solve this challenge. Our new turnkey HPE Private Cloud AI is a first-of-its-kind solution that provides deep integration with Nvidia AI computing, networking and software with HPE's AI storage, compute, and the HPE GreenLake cloud. The offering enables enterprises of every size to gain an energy-efficient, fast, and flexible path for sustainably developing and deploying generative AI applications.
Red Hat
CEO: Matt Hicks
Red Hat Tenure: 20 Years
Has Been Red Hat CEO For: 3 Years
A major challenge for many customers will be the high price of innovation and the financial realities of investing in and implementing an AI strategy.
For instance, training a single, general purpose large language model requires a lot of resources, with the largest AI models demanding some 10,000 GPUs and those models may already be out of date. In fact, research shows that by 2026, the cost of training frontier AI models will be equivalent to the US GDP which is $22 trillion. It should come as no surprise that the average CIO doesn't have a US GDP-level IT budget, nor do they have thousands of spare GPUs lying around.
For Red Hat, the answer lies in optimized, built-to-purpose, and smaller, AI models driven by open source. If we look back on how the industry has evolved over the years, CIOs have long been moving away from monolithic technologies, starting with the shift from UNIX to Linux in the early 2000s. The industry is at a similar turning point now with huge, monolithic AI models taking center stage.
So, the challenge for customers becomes exploring the options at their disposal for AI, understanding the associated costs of implementing and maintaining the technologies as well as necessary skills to do so, all while paving the way for the future of their business.
Lenovo
CEO: Yuanqing Yang
Lenovo Tenure: 20 Years
Has Been Lenovo CEO For: 36 Years
Sixty-one percent of CIOs find it challenging to demonstrate ROI from their AI investments or don't believe their organization has the proper skills to deploy AI.
Many CIOs expect to wait two to three years to show any ROI. As AI innovators, it is our role to help demonstrate the value of AI and how we can deploy the technology at speed with our partners.
Extreme Networks
CEO: Ed Meyercord
Extreme Networks Tenure: 10 Years
Has Been Extreme Networks CEO For: 16 Years
In a survey we conducted late last year of 200 CIOs and senior IT buyers, they told us their overwhelming focus is to improve the security of connected devices, while harnessing AI for tangible, ROI-focused use cases.
The toughest challenges in 2025 will be managing and securing complex network architectures, addressing increasing cyber threats and smoothly and securely deploying AI. Extreme Platform ONE aims to address these challenges by integrating networking, security and AI solutions into a single framework, simplifying network management and enhancing security.
The other significant challenge is AI and trust. At Extreme, we're focused on helping customers adopt AI at the pace of trust. There is no one size fits all with AI. We are working with customers and partners to help drive AI at a pace that they feel comfortable with and that is the beauty with the flexibility of Platform ONE, we can do that in a way that is meaningful and impactful.
Cisco
CEO: Chuck Robbins
Cisco Tenure: 28 Years
Has Been Cisco CEO For: 10 Years
The biggest challenge for our customers will be understanding the technology that the AI era demands, deploying it quickly, and building a secure, resilient infrastructure to ensure long-term success.
