Interview with Elie Kanaan, VP Marketing EMEA, VMware at TBreak

Why are businesses only now realizing the benefits of turning some of their servers virtual? What’s really been stopping them from adopting this sooner?

Adoption of virtualization is picking up quite significantly. I joined VMware two and a half years ago when we were talking about 25% of companies adopting virtualization, but now we’re talking about 50-55%. VMware specifically virtualizes x86 architecture, so if a business runs mainframes or other critical architecture, then of course virtualization won’t apply to them. Secondly, I think it’s as simple as companies not knowing about the real benefits of virtualization or that it’s not affordable or secure. Lastly, some companies might not have the IT infrastructure that would benefit from virtualization, so we’re talking about really small businesses that run maybe one or two non-critical servers.