As 2025 comes to a close, I find myself thinking about how much has changed, not just in our cloud portfolio, but across the entire US Signal business. This was our first full year operating as a combined organization following the OneNeck acquisition, and with that came a broader data center footprint, a larger engineering and operations team, and a more diverse customer base. It was also a year marked by major shifts in the virtualization market, rapid advancements in AI, and growing expectations around flexibility and performance in the hybrid cloud space.

Against that backdrop, what I’m most proud of is not a single launch or technical milestone. It’s the way our teams, our customers, and our partners collectively embraced this next chapter. 2025 was the year we proved we could integrate, innovate, and scale — all while staying grounded in what customers actually need from us.

OpenCloud’s Maturation and What It Signaled

At the start of 2025, OpenCloud was still a very new platform. We entered the year with what was essentially a minimally viable product designed to run virtual machines in a multi-tenant environment. What happened next was entirely customer-driven:our teams listened, iterated, and enhanced the platform based on real operational needs.

Two additions stood out:

SyncSafe Replication, which gave customers a platform-agnostic way to replicate workloads without being tied to a specific stack – meaning true, “any to any” replication via a lightweight agent Most customers have found OpenCloud as the best landing point for their replicated workloads.
Desktop as a Service, a direct response to MSPs and enterprises needing more reliable, high-performance desktop delivery, without the complexity and cost associated with the traditional VDI platforms

These weren’t just features. They were moments of validation that OpenCloud could evolve quickly and meaningfully because of the feedback loop we built with our customers.

Customer Behavior: The Trend That Surprised Me Most

When VMware announced the changes to its partner program and pricing, many assumed enterprise customers would be the first to seek alternatives. What we saw this year was the opposite.

Smaller organizations moved first – typically, because these organizations were disproportionately impacted by the changes in the license model – especially our customers in the Managed Service Provide space

As larger organizations have had the opportunity to step back, assess the landscape, and plan through their next motion, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of interest and adoption of OpenCloud in the second half of the year.

This shift tells me we’re heading into a year of accelerated enterprise activity, with the groundwork already laid by early adopters.

Expanding Our Core: Data Centers and Network Growth

While cloud innovation draws a lot of attention, our foundation has always come from two pillars: our data centers and our network.

This year, those pillars grew stronger.

With the OneNeck integration, we brought six additional data centers into our portfolio and expanded into new markets.
We continued investing in high-density capabilities, including liquid-cooled racks now tested and live in two facilities.
And our network, the backbone of US Signal, continued its expansion, with 1,200 new miles of fiber being added to our already extensive footprint.

These investments aren’t abstract. They enable faster connectivity, better workload placement, lower latency, and more options for customers who want their infrastructure closer to where their business operates.

Emerging Innovation Themes: AI, GPUs, and What Customers Are Asking For

Even with all the focus on stability and operational excellence, 2025 was also a year where new innovation themes emerged, especially around AI.

OpenCloud’s design gives us a unique advantage: because it’s open source and under our control, we can layer on capabilities like GPU pass-through, vGPU, and Ampere ARM CPUs much faster than traditional private cloud platforms. This allows our customers to explore with private LLMs, GPU accelerated virtual desktops, and training specialized, Small Language Models (SLMs) on lower cost, ARM CPUs.

We’re already seeing customers take advantage of this. One manufacturer in Elkhart, Indiana, is running real-time inference workloads on the US Signal cloud to detect missed welds on their production line. A practical, high-value application of AI that improves quality without requiring a team of data scientists. These are exactly the kinds of use cases we expect to see more of in 2026.

Rethinking Managed Services for a More Flexible Future

Another theme this year was reimagining how we deliver managed services, starting with Azure. We shifted away from selling units of servers and databases and toward a spend-based model that adjusts with the customer’s cloud consumption.

This model more accurately reflects how organizations use cloud today. And while Azure is the first stop, the long-term vision is broader. There is real potential for this approach to extend to OpenCloud, ReliaCloud, AWS, and beyond, giving customers a unified operational experience across multiple platforms.

Where This All Leads: Setting the Stage for 2026

Looking back, 2025 was a year of strengthening our foundation while accelerating our trajectory. We expanded our physical footprint, modernized our network, matured a new cloud platform, introduced new resiliency and desktop capabilities, and started building the AI-ready infrastructure customers are increasingly asking for.

As we move into 2026, the themes are already emerging:

More self-service for OpenCloud
Broader GPU and Ampere CPU availability
Continued data center expansion and higher-density support, including bringing OpenCloud into new markets
Network upgrades from 400G and then 800G
A more flexible, consumption-aligned managed services model
And a significant rise in enterprise-level VMware migrations

But the through line remains the same: we will keep listening to customers and building what helps them move forward.

Final Thoughts

If 2024 was the year we set the stage for a new cloud strategy, then 2025 was the year we proved its value. I’m grateful for the teams that made this possible and for the customers who gave us the feedback and the trust to keep improving.

2026 is shaping up to be our most exciting year yet, and I believe we’re entering it with the right foundation, the right momentum, and the right vision for where hybrid cloud and AI-driven workloads are headed.

david humes vp product