Hong Kong enterprises to spend $10.6 million on virtualization in 2012

By eGov Innovation Editors | Dec 29, 2011

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Hong Kong enterprises will spend $106.4 million on virtualization infrastructure software in 2012, up 14.9 percent over 2011.1, a Gartner forecast showed.

However, enterprises embracing virtualization are encountering new challenges as they seek to exploit the full potential of this new infrastructure model, according to Matthew Cheung, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner.

"Server virtualization has been steadily gaining ground among enterprises in Hong Kong in 2011. However, one of the unintended consequences that has emerged is what you might call VM sprawl - the uncontrolled growth of virtual servers in the data center. In many cases this can actually increase the total cost of ownership (TCO) of IT infrastructure and wipe out the economic benefits associated with virtualization," said Cheung.

Cheung believes that a key area of focus for these enterprises in 2012 must be around the management of these virtual servers.

"As most organizations will continue to have a combination of physical and virtual machines in their data centers, IT must plan for tighter integration and management of these assets in order to truly benefit from the economic promises of virtualization," he said.

Another unintended consequence of many current virtualization implementations is the explosion in data volumes. However, as Cheung noted, enterprise IT departments are increasingly less keen on resolving the problem simply by buying more storage.

"What they really want is a software solution that will help them better utilize existing hardware, including software-based solutions like deduplication and thin provisioning. Together with virtualization, storage management software will be hot in 2012. Companies looking at virtualization should also look at storage management in tandem for better utilization of storage resources," he said.

As enterprise understanding of IT virtualization continues to mature, Cheung predicts the next area to gain traction among local firms in 2012 will be desktop virtualization. However, he warns, this too offers hurdles that must be considered carefully.

"Along the journey, we expect enterprises to test the waters with private cloud projects. IT needs to transform itself into a service unit rather than just a call center or fulfillment centre. This service-oriented mentality will be critical to IT's successful migration of the enterprise into the cloud. We will see much more of that in 2012," he said.