The Virtualization movement continues to grow by leaps and bounds as companies seek out ways to slash IT costs by extracting the most from their existing infrastructure investments.  Recent forecasts from IDC indicate a significant, sustained growth in virtualization software. 

According to Mary Johnston Turner, IDC research director, Enterprise System Management, "Distributed virtual server management software is one of the few market segments that is bucking downward trends. We forecast a five-year CAGR of 21.3% for 2009–2013 as this market grows along with the ramp-up of large-scale, production use of virtual servers to support a wide range of mission-critical workloads."

As you might expect, there is a "cause and effect" relationship between the bullish prospects for virtualization software and the downward forecast for server hardware.  In fact, IDC is calling for a 3.6% contraction in overall hardware sales in 2009.  The hardest hit segments are expected to be servers.

Software vendors like Oracle and others are taking advantage of virtualization by offering their software applications in pre-configured virtual images.  This certainly has the potential to simplify otherwise complex and onerous installation procedures for customers and partners.  On the other hand, a virtual image still needs something to run on. 

For most EPM and BI power users and administrators, the road to software exploration still leads through their IT department for hardware provisioning and support.  For many, the experience is akin to suddenly hitting a traffic-stopping accident scene while driving to a U2 concert.  The frustration with "what is" quickly eclipses the excitement over "what could be". 

"Why is this?", you ask your IT manager.  Maybe it's Pride (not the in the name of love variety).  Maybe its Vertigo.  Whatever the reason, You Still Haven't Found What You're Looking For.  Well, before you throw your innovative ideas into the Unforgettable Fire, consider cloud computing.

Public clouds including Amazon Web Services, while yet to be widely adopted for production deployment of enterprise apps, can be your own personal detour around the accident scene of IT red tape.  From a user interface and functional perspective, cloud servers look and act like your own internal servers (maybe better).  From a practical perspective, cloud computing makes it a lot easier and convenient to test and develop on new applications platforms.

After all, the point is to work with the applications themselves, not the virtualization software.

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