Virtualization is being seen as a saviour by organizations after the recent economic turmoil. Enterprises have a very clear mandate now i.e. use appropriate technology to do even more with less. It wants to implement technologies that will help them achieve business goals while drastically cutting down costs. Undertaking a virtualization initiative is seen as an answer to most problems as it helps cut power and real estate costs, increase automation and aid intelligent allocation of resources.

Experts claim that it is one of the most poised technologies for growth and holds a presumably strong potential to change the face of IT. But is that really so? CIO Connect research bureau undertook a comprehensive survey to gain perspectives on the usage of virtualization techniques across enterprises in India, comprehend the challenges of adoption and probe into the benefits virtualization poses.

The survey was conducted with a sample size of over 400 CIOs, CTOs, VP-ITs of various large companies of India across verticals. The survey demonstrated that majority of IT leaders are exploring virtualization options on an urgent basis.

Clear business benefits

Over 85 percent of respondents of the 400 IT leaders that were surveyed have good understanding of virtualization technology and over 20 percent have implemented the technology within their organization. The picture will improve in the coming years. Over 35 percent of the respondents claim they will use virtualization in their organizations over the next three years.

Key reasons for adoption include: (based on priority)
•    Increase in IT agility and scalability
•    Uptime and performance
•    Huge cost savings
•    Faster provisioning
•    Better disaster recovery
•    Administrative ease-of-use

While over 75 percent of respondents would put their mission-critical applications on a virtualized environment, the adoption rate of the technology is relatively low in India.

CIOs see virtualization as one of the most sought after technology in the future of their organization’s IT stack. They believe that virtualization will bring about a fundamental change in IT of Indian organizations.

Challenges of virtualization adoption

According to CIOs the greatest hurdles to virtualization included security, stability concerns, difficulty in building operational processes for a virtualized environment and management.

Maintaining security standards (35 percent) and change management issues (28 percent) along with compatibility challenges (34 percent) were cited as the biggest implementation challenges.

As security is a major impediment to adoption of the technology, addressing the issue by technology providers will help CIOs in moving towards virtualization.  

Opportunity exists for better training and implementation best practices among IT teams that will help boost adoption of virtualization.

Virtualization trends for 2011

The survey revealed that the major focus (20 percent) would be on moving more applications from test or development to production environment. Next on the priority list is expanding number of applications running on virtual machines (19 percent). The trends reveal that in the coming year Indian organizations would deploy a storage virtualization solution to support virtual server environment.

Making use of virtual machine replication for disaster recovery and integrating virtual environments into existing management software frameworks will be seen on a large scale. Companies will also look at purchasing third-party management software for virtual environments.

Globally, it is estimated that by 2011 virtualization is going to be a $15-20 billion market.

Note on methodology

The Enterprise Virtualization survey was conducted by CIO Connect research bureau.

The 400+ respondents include C‐level executives (e.g. CIO, CTO) and other IT decision-makers (e.g. Head IT, Director IT, AVP-IT, EVP-IT, SVP-IT, VP-IT, AGM, DGM, GM, IT Manager, Sr. Manager IT). All the respondents belong to large organizations with 500+ employees.

The survey was conducted by the editorial staff of CIO Connect through a combination of methodologies such as one-on-one interviews, email interactions and telephonic interviews, online and social media.

Companies surveyed span major industries

Editorial remarks

There has been an explosion in data and IT infrastructure over the past decade, fueled in part by a proliferation of low-cost devices and this growth, combined with a disparate infrastructure, has significantly increased unnecessary complexity for most IT organizations. This has led to huge cost pressures, limiting IT flexibility and reducing the ability to invest in innovations to support business strategic goals.

CIOs are looking at IT simplification initiatives – essentially assessment of their infrastructure indexed against comparable companies in their industry, design and implement technologies such as virtualization to establish a more streamlined IT infrastructure and reduce operating costs and complexity, with improved support of their overall strategic IT and business objectives.

About the study

This report is an outcome of a primary survey CIO Connect conducted in December 2010. The respondents were CIOs belonging to large enterprises defined as organizations with 500 or more IT users. Participant profile, awareness and perception of virtualization, expected benefits and challenges of adoption and outlook were among the areas the survey covered. The respondents were representative of all industry sectors from India.

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About CIO Connect and Enigma

CIO Connect is an online media brand of Enigma Interactive. It focuses on the chief information officer or the IT head of an organization. This media property was conceived because we realized that CIOs don’t just surf for information on the web, they shape it. They are more intense than any other users. They upload, download, share, and comment. The brand was built to fill this vacuum. The brand is presently powered by a guild of seasoned reporters and research analysts, who cull out crucial business information, market insights and underlying industry trends to help IT decision-makers make informed decision.

Enigma Interactive with its acquisition of a global research brand for CIOs, addresses the information and content needs, research and analysis for CIO and IT Leader community in India, Middle East, APAC (limited to SAARC, South East Asia, and some parts of APAC not including China, Japan and Korea) and ANZ (Australia and New Zealand).

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