Refresh The 7-Year By Todd Hemenway The traditional three-year hardware and storage refresh model is gone. Companies are sweating their assets up to five to seven years. Systems are lasting longer, reducing failure risk, and as a result there is less urgency to replace infrastructure. The improvement in technology has created a new market reality where this reliability paradoxically slows down modernization efforts. Customers are evaluating more cautiously and delaying decisions, sometimes indefinitely, which stretches sales cycles and timeto-revenue, according to analysts at S&P Global. At the same time, “While budgets for CIOs are increasing, a significant portion will merely offset price increases within their recurrent spending,” said John-David Lovelock, Gartner vice president. Vendors now need to make a stronger, strategic case for why enterprises should upgrade. As vendors have focused on building sustainable and powerful systems, infrastructure is now often performing beyond expectations. For many companies, this means that subsystems they bought five years ago are still working “good enough.” Meanwhile, the current macroeconomic environment is forcing budget pressures. This is pushing maintenance of existing infrastructure over investment in new hardware, since maintenance renewals are cheaper. While 10 years ago the most common (37 percent) refresh cycle was three years, that has extended to five or more years with 52 percent of IT and data center managers, according to an Uptime Institute survey. This shift represents not just stronger technology but also changing internal buying dynamics. With more stakeholders involved, enterprises are increasingly cautious and ROI-focused. Meanwhile, enterprises are considering multiple infrastructure models. The models include capex versus opex, as-a-service and leasing/buyout structures, each of which has different effects on budgeting, cash flow and long-term costs. Traditional upfront capex purchases involve large one-time expenditures and long-term asset commitments, while opex and as-a-service models spread costs over time, improve cash flow predictability and increase flexibility. Leasing and buyout structures allow enterprises to defer capital outlays while still maintaining an ownership path. After organizations assess the financial and operational implications of these consumption models, they also weigh sustainability, such as power usage, adding new layers to the evaluaInfrastructure growth in a sweat-the-assets era 36 CHANNELVISION | SPRING 2026 CORE COMMUNICATIONS
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