Until recently, almost no IT industry vendor or analyst questioned the assumption that nearly all kinds of virtualization deliver quick, significant cost savings compared to computing only in the physical world.
I came across an article in InfoWorld about a survey that TheInfoPro conducted among Fortune 1000 firms regarding their use of public cloud storage offerings. The bottom line: they haven't, they aren't, and they won't. 87 per cent of respondents stated they have no plans to use public storage-as-a-service, while only 10 per cent say that they will. Clearly, the survey indicates this market segment has no use for cloud storage.
During the past three to five years, when most companies began rolling out virtual servers in earnest as replacements for physical servers, acceptance has grown so quickly among both end users and IT staffs that more than half of all companies now deploy new applications on virtual servers by preference, rather than physical ones, according to a December study from IDC.
This week I saw two articles that captured the two visions of IT that will dominate the future. Both were interviews with senior IT leaders, one a CIO of a major technology company, the other a senior executive with a leading system integrator. One article depicted a vision of IT as a future of standardized, commodity offerings, while the other portrayed IT as a critical part of every company's business offerings. Two visions of ITs role in stark contrast to one another. Each seems to obviate the other. But is that really true? My take is that both views are true, and the CIO of the future has to push one to make room to achieve the other.
The agreement announced this week by VMware and LG electronics will act a proof of concept of VMware's virtualization technology on mobile devices, but may not do either VMware or LG much good otherwise, analysts say.