The Golden Age of Middleware is Here
By Puneet Agarwal, January 30, 2026
Most of the talk in AI is centered around the models, applications, and daily advances in vibe coding. However, the middleware layer between the apps and models is seeing a massive surge as well.
My career started in middleware working at BEA Systems in the early 2000s. Most people reading this have probably never heard of an “application server,” but it was the original middleware—the core orchestration layer of the internet that sat between web clients and databases.
With AI, this layer is being completely disrupted again. Three fundamental truths are driving this movement in the enterprise:
- Agents are here to stay.
- Multiplexing across models is becoming mandatory. Whether there will ultimately be three or 3,000 models, we live in a multimodel world.
- Context matters more than ever as our friends at Foundation Capital recently noted.
As a result, we are going to need trillions of dollars worth of startups to help answer critical questions:
- How do we build the container infrastructure to version control agents (Git for infrastructure)?
- How do we manage the actual rack control plane for the AI factory, making it programmable for the first time?
- How do we move from routing packets to context-aware networking?
- Who will build the higher performance reasoning layer that seamlessly sits across models?
- How do we maintain memory, context, governance, full traceability, and observability across agents?
- How do we evaluate and even simulate multiagent systems so we can trust them in production?
- How do we manage identity and authorization in agentic environments?
- How do we handle “heavy” multimodal data efficiently?
- How do we recreate the software development lifecycle to absorb, validate, debug, review, and repair code changes without human intervention when Cursor’s agent-swarm experiment is doing 30,000 commits per week, for example?
- How do we refactor code autonomously across multiple repositories?
The questions above are paramount and yet barely scratch the surface. Vibe coding is all the rage today and justifiably so, but, the deployment of code within the enterprise is a 10x bigger opportunity. Datadog, Hashicorp, GitHub, Atlassian, VMware, Splunk, JFrog, MuleSoft, Okta, and many others will all have to be reinvented.
As “boring” as it sounds, the golden age of middleware is here. And no, the models are not just going to own it all.