Virtualisation: widely adopted but largely untapped, says HP

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 04 September 2008 13:09

Business IT - Technology

HP has released the results of commissioned global research claiming it shows virtualisation widespread but only in the early stages of exploitation for business advantage.

"While 86 percent of technology decision makers have implemented virtualisation projects, most are only in the beginning stages," HP claims. "Among those who have begun implementing projects, 89 percent expect to virtualise one-fourth of their technology environments by 2010. Yet the power and potential of virtualisation is not broadly understood as only one-third of survey respondents think of virtualisation as a business tool."
 
Many survey respondents anticipate that they will eventually virtualise 75 percent of their environments, HP says, but, "Do not yet view dollars spent on virtualisation as an investment in business growth. Most are not deploying virtualisation broadly against a comprehensive strategy, which can limit the ability to create renewable, flexible resources focused on business priorities...The majority do not associate a more efficient, cost-effective infrastructure designed to adapt to changing business needs with stronger overall business performance. Only 37 percent associate virtualisation with accelerated growth, and 35 percent with competitive advantage."
 
According to Tony Parkinson, vice president, enterprise storage and servers, HP Asia Pacific & Japan, "Companies that capture the full potential of virtualisation are able to accelerate growth by streamlining deployment of new or enhanced business services. A strategy based simply on cost and efficiency overlooks virtualisation's capacity to reduce risk by improving business continuity and increasing security of end-user data."

According to HP's research, the biggest barriers or inhibitors to virtualisation are: upfront costs, staff training/experience, gaining approval from corporate management and infrastructure planning. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed said culture changes around management or line of business buy-in and increased investment in technology staff training were needed.

HP released details of the study to co-incide with launch of a portfolio of products, services and solutions for deploying virtualisation across the data centre. It was undertaken by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates who conducted 150 in-depth interviews among CIOs and senior business and technology decision makers from enterprise to mid-sized companies in North America, Western Europe (United Kingdom, France and Germany), Eastern Europe (Russia and the Czech Republic), Asia-Pacific (India, China, Japan and Australia), and Latin America (Brazil and Mexico) during July and August 2008.

A copy of the full report is available  here.