SHI International On Dell, Palantir, VMware, OpenAI And Hot Market Trends

An executive at SHI International weighs in on “tight” partnerships with VMware and Dell during a supply chain crisis, OpenAI and Anthropic’s channel push, and the hot market trends SHI is seeing in 2026.

A top SHI International executive told CRN that he is “incredibly bullish” about the firm’s position in the global market as the $16 billion IT superstar offers a vast portfolio of solutions in the AI era where size matters.

“Our size, scale, and ability to invest as a private company really sets us apart,” said Ryan Sheehan (pictured), senior vice president of Advanced Solutions at SHI International.

“Sometimes partners can view large scale partners as lacking value, and we view that as untrue in today’s market,” he said. “What really resonates with customers is, very few—if any—can provide the global scale that a company like us has with the value and technical expertise and service delivery.”

The 7,000-strong global SHI International workforce is giving customers insights to make better decisions with their technology spending, AI plans and overall growth hopes.

“In a world changing so fast with AI and cybersecurity, I’m incredibly bullish on SHI’s position to help customers navigate all of this,” Sheehan said.

In an interview with CRN, Sheehan talked about partnerships with Dell Technologies, VMware, Palantir as well as hot market trends and how SHI is helping clients through supply chain constraints.

What is SHI doing to help customers with the market’s memory and compute supply chain issues?

We’re a top partner with almost all the major OEM hardware, so we have a very tight relationship and we’re able to be in constant communication. Then we help to communicate that reality back to a customer.

Initially was like, “Hey, don’t panic buy. Let’s see how this thing goes.”

And then it’s, “Whoa, this thing’s going to be around for a long time. So let’s adjust. Let’s talk about how you’re allocating investment, how you’re allocating capital.”

This is going to be here for a while. So customers can’t wait two or three years—like what’s the best way, what’s the best time to figure out your workload, and let’s figure out the infrastructure that that it sits on, and how you can actually get it and deploy it in a reasonable time inside your budget cycle.

It’s a tricky one, but we’re navigating it well with customers.

What vendors are SHI teaming with to help alleviate customers regarding memory and hardware shortages?

As it ties to VMware, we’ve seen a lot of success with customers just saying, “How do you use technology features like NVMe tiering to maybe free up existing infrastructure in a better way, so you can deploy some new workloads without stretching the budget?”

So that’s a lot of it.

On the OEM side, we’re a very strong Dell partner.

Dell seems to be navigating that really well with their supply chain management.

Dell is an interesting place because they’re not just server OEM, they have devices and all kinds of different hardware. So they get some benefits of scale.

The Dell team has learned through many previous supply chain constraints and the impact of that, and adjusted, and have been ready for this latest one.

Dell has seemingly put themselves in a very good position.

OpenAI and Anthropic are starting to form a channel partner ecosystem. What is SHI’s take on those two AI stars entering the channel?

They’re killing it in the industry. It’s interesting because the skill sets are new so they can probably pay a lot for top talent.

We’re exploring those partnerships.

We’re excited to see Anthropic and OpenAI develop partner programs and try to standardize that because it was always, “Where is the channel’s place in this part of the ecosystem?”

So to see them investing in the channel is good, and we’re exploring those avenues as well.

What about another standout in the AI era in Palantir?

We have already partnered with Palantir.

So we have a separate agentic business that we’re standing up, really specifically helping healthcare and commercial customers bring a Palantir platform into an agentic model that really can benefit there.

So yeah, we’re absolutely looking at them and helping.

We’re not doing a bunch of deployments for them right now. It’s still really new in their partner programs.

So we are looking at and exploring all of them.

What are some of the positive market trends SHI is seeing in 2026?

Everything revolves around cybersecurity.

The change that we see in all of our infrastructure conversations is that cyber is now included.

So it’s no longer just, “Hey, it’s a private cloud.” It’s got to be a secure private cloud.

If it’s an end user device, it’s a secure end user device. So the cyber space is incredibly hot right now.

There’s so many good technology platform providers. A lot of those providers are doing some good things around forming new alliances together. The more that those alliances are formed between those different platforms, the customer benefit is really strong.

AI is obviously the topic du jour all the time, anywhere from—productivity AI using Copilot cloud to private AI clouds for custom workloads. We’re seeing great wins there.

Lastly, we’re seeing a lot of spend optimization.

So if you look at SHI’s services around: how do we help a customer take budget and stretch that as much as you can through our FinOps services, tokenomics assessments, storage assessments—that is really giving customers the data to make really good decisions.