Survey: Virtualization Projects Look at ‘Big Year’ in 2012 
Virtualization may be the big winner in 2012 IT budgets, according to one eye-popping survey. More than half of IT decision makers will spend at least 25% of budgets on virtualization projects next year; and 40% say they may spend one-half or more of their budgets. The survey from Quest Software interviewed more than 200 organizations.
Virtualization may be the big winner in 2012 IT budgets, according to one eye-popping survey.
More than half of IT decision makers will spend at least 25% of budgets on virtualization projects next year; and 40% say they may spend one-half or more of their budgets. The survey from Quest Software interviewed more than 200 organizations.
Respondents noted several benefits to virtualization, including:
- Improving business agility,
- Delivering cost savings, maximizing impact from IT investments,
- Meeting increasingly demanding user expectations, and
- Managing the growing surge in enterprise mobile workers
The push to “improve business agility” was cited by a huge majority of those surveyed, 61 percent. The power to maximize the impact of reduced budgets closely followed, cited by 56 percent of respondents. Further down the list were meeting user expectations (31 percent) and supporting mobile users (28 percent).
“The results of this survey reinforce what we’ve been hearing from customers recently, that implementation of virtualization across servers and desktops has moved from proof of concept to production environments,” said Quest Software’s CTO Carl Eberling in a statement. With the rapid adoption of virtualization techniques for servers, applications, desktops and even private clouds, “customers now fully realize the complexity involved with managing the overall environment,” he added.
Quest’s online survey also asked respondents about their plans to manage their virtualization deployments – from backup and recovery, desktop virtualization, performance monitoring, and capacity management, as well as their company’s virtualization priorities for 2012.
Backup and recovery for managing virtualization was rated as most critical by some 60% of respondents. Some 70 percent of respondents said they have a solution to monitor virtualized environments, or are in the process of evaluating one.
The survey shows that virtualization and private cloud options, with their proven benefits, are now not simply experimental projects – but are also supporting core systems, according to one analyst.
"Virtualization management of both servers and desktop is quickly becoming a high IT priority as businesses virtualize more mission- critical workloads and embrace desktop virtualization solutions,” said Mark Bowker, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group in a statement.
Quest Software surveyed 235 IT professionals who attended the 2011 VMworld events in Las Vegas and Copenhagen. Companies ranging from less than 1,000 employees to more than 15,000 across all market segments participated in the survey.
