The Crystal Ball: Virtualization Market Predictions for 2008

At the recent ManageFusion conference, Steve Morton, Symantec vice president of product management and strategy, polled the Altiris Customer Advisory Board about its highest spending priorities for 2008. Not surprisingly, virtualization was at the top of the list. Despite the potential complexities of virtualization, the ease of deploying and managing new technologies in a virtualized environment coupled with the savings in capital hardware expenditure makes the siren song of virtualization too great to ignore.

Symantec customers are far from alone in their quest for virtualization in 2008. CIO Magazine’s Laurianne McLaughlin takes an in-depth look at all the aspects of virtualization in her recent report in CIO’s “Virtualization in the Enterprise Survey.”

This survey reports that of virtualization options, the move to desktop virtualization is the slowest, due to the cost and complexities of managing virtualized PCs. This is no surprise to Symantec, but we argue that virtualization and management are synonymous. Symantec management technologies, such as Altiris Client Management Suite, work hand in hand with Symantec virtualization technologies, like Altiris Software Virtualization Solution, to improve IT service to the end user. We build our virtualization technology to help our customers make their computing environments more manageable, not more complex.

For those of you watching the virtualization market closely, here’s another interesting CIO Magazine read. In this article, Laurianne McLaughlin states that “through 2013, management tools, processes, expertise, and services (not functionality) will remain the key limiting factor in user adoption of IT Virtualization." This is the conclusion of consulting firm Saugatuck Technology in its recently published report.

The demand for virtualization is clearly upon us, but are you ready to manage it? Or are you using virtualization technology as an element of your management strategy?