Improving business agility, delivering cost savings, meeting increasingly demanding user expectations, and managing the growing mobile workforce will be the top drivers of IT spending on virtualization initiatives in 2012, according to a Quest Software survey of more than 200 organizations. In addition, more than half of the respondents surveyed indicated that at least 25 percent of their 2012 IT budgets will be allocated to virtualization projects across a broad range of critical initiatives, including backup and recovery, virtual desktops, network management, and performance and capacity management, thus highlighting the clear need among the end-user community for comprehensive virtualization management solutions.
Asked to identify the business requirements most likely to drive increased prioritization of virtualization initiatives in 2012, the need to improve business agility was cited by 61 percent of respondents. Maximizing reduced budgets was cited by 56 percent of respondents, while meeting increasingly demanding user expectations and managing an increasingly mobile workforce were cited by 31 percent and 28 percent, respectively.
The Quest survey also indicated that a significant portion of IT budgets in 2012 will be allocated to virtualization-related initiatives, with more than half of respondents indicating that their organizations planned to allocate at least 25 percent of annual spending to virtualization projects. In addition, 40 percent of respondents surveyed indicated that their organizations would spend up to 50 percent of their IT budgets on virtualization, and 10 percent of respondents indicated that more than half of their IT budgets would be allocated to such projects.
Respondents ranked backup and recovery as the aspect of virtualization management most important to their business, with more than 60 percent identifying it as their most critical virtualization initiative.
Virtualization monitoring continues to be a priority, as more than 70 percent of respondents indicate they either have a virtualization monitoring solution in place today or are in the process of evaluating one. More organizations are also increasingly prioritizing their desktop virtualization and capacity management projects, with more than 50 percent of respondents stating they already have a solution in place or are in the process of evaluating one for each area.
Source:http://vmblog.com/archive/2011/12/07/quest-software-survey-reveals-improving-business-agility-and-managing-the-mobile-workforce-among-top-drivers-of-virtualization-initiatives-in-2012.aspx
