Just when you thought there could not possibly be yet
another conference onvirtualisation, more flyers arrive
through the electronic letterbox.
The statistics are alarming. Ten thousand people at VMWorld and
90% of adopters see space and energy saving as the principal
benefits.
So why have so many grasped the message so late, not realising
they are riding a dwindling wave while the big one is coming up
fast behind?
Adoption is polarised. My business - the EWS Group - fully
virtualised two years ago. Others in our industry have not even
started, missing out on years of benefits.
There are several possible reasons for this. Perhaps it is
because mainstream suppliers, including Microsoft, have been slow
to deliver their own products. It could be that the benefits,
restricted to the datacentre, are too hard to present in business
terms to the investment committee. It may even be a misconception
of the risk, or rather lack of it, that is holding people back.
What they have not spotted, is that those who have made the
server virtualisation leap, and loved it, are already moving to the
next stage - application virtualisation. In doing so, they are
decoupling previously static and siloed applications from the fixed
hardware and datacentre, thereby allowing the alignment of resource
with demand across multiple servers, locations and even suppliers
in real time.
This is where the real business benefit is. Let's be clear,
server virtualisation is good and there are real hardware, energy,
space and management cost savings. But these are simple benefits
and only available in proportion to servers saved. In other words,
although worth doing, it's not terribly exciting.
In contrast, application virtualisation unlocks benefits of
altogether another order. Virtualising the application, and
therefore optimising a business process and not merely an IT asset,
delivers uniquely a direct link between IT spend and business
benefit.
There is an even more exciting bit. Combining the emerging
technologies of application virtualisation and SaaS opens up the
opportunity to deliver new business models at dramatically reduced
costs in support of changed business processes. Is it just hype?
Well, it would not be the IT industry if there was no hype, but
these approaches really will change the way we consume IT and
provide service to our businesses. New entrants will emerge to
challenge existing providers with genuinely innovative business
models.
Server capacity will be traded as a commodity, much like
electricity. Consumers of Mips will buy from the cheapest supplier,
not with a ten-year contract, not even a ten-week contract, but
exactly when they want it. When our demand is high, we will buy
spare capacity in the market, moving between suppliers across the
globe as price and demand changes, all in real time. We will exist
at a point on the cost-service curve that we cannot conceive of
today and hardware failure driven outages will be a thing of the
past.
So virtualisation is rapidly becoming yesterday's "must do"
technology. Now it is also tomorrow's, but in a radically different
form.
For those of you who have not yet spotted it, get on your
boards, the wave is coming and it is a big one.