Tech Trends: Virtualization Regains Momentum

By Gennifer Biggs, Business Solutions magazine.

The growing popularity of cloud solutions, both private and public, is driving a resurgence of interest in virtualization.

Behind all the talk of cloud-based solutions, public clouds, private cloud, and hybrid solutions lies a clear need for virtualization expertise. Why? Because to better leverage the value propositions of the cloud, an IT environment must be constructed and optimized to empower the flexibility and portability of the cloud. "Customers are urgently looking to acquire the ability to build a dynamic and portable infrastructure and to dynamically deliver those resources to more quickly address rapidly changing business demands," explains Richard Percaccio, enterprise marketing manager for the global commercial channel at Dell. "One of the first steps in building a dynamic and portable infrastructure is to decouple the conventional tie between applications and their supporting physical infrastructure, and virtualization is widely understood as the most practical means for doing just that." So, where does that leave you as a solutions provider? It turns you into a systems integrator with a new definition: you are truly melding on-premise with off to squeeze the most from IT investments, whether that means building a fully virtualized private cloud environment, maintaining and managing a hybrid solution, or helping a start-up leverage the power of the public cloud to fuel more rapid growth. "Though mutually exclusive in technical definition, the concepts of ‘cloud' and ‘virtualization' will be forever linked like peanut butter and jelly, yin and yang, and Captain and Tenille," says Brian Feller, VP of sales and marketing for WhipTail Tech. "In the end, it's a bit of the ‘chicken and the egg' scenario: there is no cloud without virtualization, and now the growth of the cloud will only push the adoption (in all forms) of virtualization broader and deeper into cyberspace."