Our 2026 World Tour is well underway, and I’ve had the opportunity to attend events in London, Phoenix, and Atlanta to spend time with customers, partners, and peers who are navigating this dramatic moment in IT. My favorite aspect of these events is the conversation among everyone in the room. People are candid, thoughtful, and I get a sense that we’re all in this together.
Three themes keep coming up across these and other cities SolarWinds has visited. First, and perhaps most obviously, AI is top of mind. Second, teams are prioritizing the impact their work has on the business. And third, the change facing us today is dramatic, making community and support for each other critical.
AI Is Top of Mind, and the Excitement Is Real
Across every stop, AI is what people want to talk about. Not abstractly, but practically. “How do I use this responsibly?” and “How does this change my workflows?”
The energy is genuine. Customers from government agencies to financial services firms are actively building AI workflows, rethinking how their teams operate, and exploring what’s possible. One sentiment I heard in London captured the mood perfectly: “It’s too late to say no to AI.” This isn’t reluctant adoption. It’s a recognition that AI is already reshaping the work, and the teams who engage with it thoughtfully are the ones who will come out ahead.
At the same time, people are asking exactly the right questions: about autonomy, guardrails, and what it means to keep humans appropriately in the loop. These aren’t blockers, they’re the mark of responsible operators who want to move forward with confidence, not just speed.
Business Impact Is the Goal
I sense a continued shift in how teams are framing their work. The conversation continues to elevate from the technology they manage to the services they deliver and the customers and constituents they serve.
I heard this across the board. A financial services customer uses a dashboard that tracks transactions end-to-end through their system. They can quickly isolate and fix any issue that puts transactions at risk. A public sector organization described SolarWinds as having evolved from a tactical tool into a strategic one, reducing tool sprawl and giving leadership the visibility to make decisions based on impact to the organization. The question isn’t just “is the network up?” It’s “are our customers being served? Are our constituents getting what they need?”
The ROI framing has shifted too. The most compelling business cases I heard weren’t just about trimming costs; they were about the value of having visibility and heading off potential issues. One customer described their ability to solve problems before user impact as, “allowing our employees to keep doing their jobs.” In essence, our customers do the job that keep their businesses and government services up and running.
Change Is Dramatic — and Community Has Never Mattered More
The pace of change right now is a lot to handle. A whole lot. AI, platform consolidation, budget pressure, skills gaps, shifting architectures. It’s all arriving at once. The most encouraging message from these events is no one is navigating this alone. We’re all working together to meet this challenge.
In London, a customer shared that they’re publishing solutions to the SolarWinds THWACK community portal, so others don’t have to solve the same problems from scratch. In Phoenix, a customer relayed a story of getting a feature request addressed in real time during a one-on-one session. In Atlanta, a long-tenured customer described the contrast between his relationship with the SolarWinds community and other teams’ struggles to maintain systems built in-house.
In our own lives, when things feel overwhelming we lean on our support system to help us through. That was the feeling I took away from these events. We’re a support system for each other, and there are individuals in every city stepping up to help.
A Word on SW1
Our headline announcement heading into our World Tour is our new agentic AI capability, SW1™. It generated some of the most animated conversations I had on the road, and for good reason.
Customers who’ve seen the integrated story come together, with SW1 able to cut through the noise, surface what’s most important, and take action to achieve the outcomes that matter most are seeing a path to the future. Reactions ranged from, “This will get us out of constant manual triage,” to “We can meaningfully change the customer experience.”
I’m as excited about SW1 as I’ve been about any product release I’ve been a part of in my career. The opportunities are wide open, and I’m looking forward to talking with more of you about it in other World Tour stops this year.
The Conversation Continues
Every city on this tour is a reminder that the challenges are shared, the ambition is real, and the community is the connective tissue that makes all of it work better.
If you haven’t joined us on the road for World Tour yet, there are still more stops ahead, and from firsthand experience, the conversations, connections, and insights are absolutely worth showing up for.
The dialogue doesn’t end when the event wraps, and neither does the opportunity to learn from peers, customers, and experts tackling the same challenges every day.
Join us for an upcoming World Tour stop and be part of the conversations shaping what’s next for IT and observability.
