Interest in Server Virtualization growing amongst Enterprises in US

There has been a significant increase in the interest taken by medium sized enterprises based in US in server virtualization. These statistics are according to the latest MB tracking study conducted by AMI. The percentage of US based medium enterprise that consider server virtualization to be important from the strategic point of view has increased from 46 percent to as many as 75 percent. This clearly indicates that about 50 percent more medium businesses have expressed their interest in server virtualization as compared with last year.

The Manager of Managed Services at AMI-Partners, Melissa Chong, noted that “2009 was a turning point for server virtualization usage among U.S. medium businesses, accelerated by the affects of the economic downturn as midmarket CIOs and IT managers looked for ways to cut IT costs and boost asset utilization.” As a response to this growing interest, channel partners and IT vendors have increased their focus on the medium enterprise market in US by providing new and innovative virtualization solutions to them. Chong also added that, “Server virtualization can yield many benefits for a midmarket firm. At the most basic level, it improves utilization and reduces the number of physical servers, while at the same time, reducing electricity and cooling costs. In addition, U.S. MBs become more responsive to users’ needs by reducing application deployment and migration times.”

However, implementing virtualization techniques can prove to be a challenge for many medium enterprises because it requires expertise in IT for an efficient implementation. Additionally, virtualization often requires businesses to upgrade their old server, networking and storage hardware in order to optimize the new virtualized environment, which adds to the opinion about virtualization that it is a complicated and expensive procedure.

In spite of these perceptions, AMI expects that midsized companies in US will increase deployment of virtualization in the future as they upgrade their IT infrastructures. “U.S. Midmarket firms are becoming more aware of the concept and benefits of virtualization as a whole. When midmarket firms upgrade their infrastructure, they will look into virtualization across server, clients, storage and networks as well,” said Ms. Chong. Chong also exclaimed that, “In the past few months, companies like Cisco, Dell, HP & IBM have announced their own virtualization bundles targeting U.S. MBs, in order to make it easier for them to adopt virtualization solutions and prevent incompatibilities that could up-end the entire virtualization effort.”