The virtual opportunity

With Australia and New Zealand having the highest rate of adoption of virtualisation in the world so far, the technology has now evolved to become one of the hottest topics in IT.

Indeed the 2008 CMP Channel State of the Market Study found that nearly one in five solution providers surveyed are already currently selling or recommending virtualisation products of some sort, including server and/or storage virtualisation. According to the CMP Channel’s first study on virtualisation, VARs that sell server virtualisation products, such as technology from VMware, SWsoft, Herndon and Citrix Systems, are seeing that technology already account for an average of 20 percent of their revenue.

The great thing about virtualisation is that it addresses so many of the current issues IT departments face today. By increasing utilisation and improving management, it promotes server consolidation, resulting in significant data centre savings, compounded by savings in airconditioning, rack space, staffing levels and compliance costs. And with environmental concerns now at the heart of all good business, virtualisation is also being pushed as a ‘Green’ technology – an aspect that resellers have been quick to pick up on.

Brett Lightfoot is national Microsoft solutions and alliance manager for solutions provider Getronics Australia. Alongside acknowledging the various ways that virtualisation can help an organisation reduce its carbon footprint, Lightfoot agrees that virtualisation “has certainly created a significant market enthusiasm and has generated a lot of business for a range of ICT services and solutions over the past 18 months”.

He believes virtualisation is not a silo solution, but generally touches every area of a business’s ICT infrastructure. “This creates opportunities across the board, ranging from consulting and software supply to network design and ongoing support.

“For many businesses, virtualisation offers not only significant cost savings, but also a highly agile platform that can help an organisation grow. The key to achieving this is for organisations to understand what the best solution mix is to suit their business,” he said.