On November 5, a renowed French IT publication hosted a conference on virtualisation at the Park Hyatt Paris Vendôme. Participants heard more about the current state of virtualisation and how businesses are using it, including the results from a survey of more than 5,000 French companies. While we wait for the official presentation to be published, here's a sneak peek at the major themes covered.
Where we're headed
- About 50% of companies have already implemented a virtualisation project or plan to in the next 12 months.
- Around 30% of the future projects covered in the study deal with servers, while 75% focus on workstations.
Where we've been
- CIOs are aware of--and using--server virtualisation: 68% of the companies surveyed had virtualised 40% of their servers and 22% had virtualised 80% of their servers.
- VDI companies are an exception: more than 86% of the VDI companies surveyed had brought virtualisation to less than 20% of their customer base on the PC side.
- CIOs are highly involved in the decision to virtualise, often acting as the project's primary champion.
- Only 17% of respondents with completed virtualisation projects had calculated their post-project ROI! About 30% calculated ROI before the project began and another 30% had never done the calculation.
Why bother with virtualisation?
- Reduces material costs
- Establishes Business Continuity Plan (BCP)/Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)
- Helps consolidate and optimise infrastructure use
- Increases flexibility
- Simplifies administration
Helping virtualisation
- Simplification, quick installation of machines
- Lower rate of system breakdowns
Hurting virtualisation
- Lack of internal skills
- Fees (licences)
- Fear that sensitive software will no longer work
When it comes to choosing integrators, companies appear to be basing their decision on consulting expertise--not size and rates as one might expect.
Although these survey results cover only part of the French landscape, they nonetheless offer valuable insight into current trends in virtualisation.