IT as a Service: the virtualisation goal

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The first steps of virtualisation may have been about saving capital expenditure, but the ultimate goal is to treat IT as a Service.

This was the message presented by executives at VMworld 2010, being held in Copenhagen this week.

Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer (CMO) of the virtualisation giant, took to the stage to outline the phases of adoption and hammered home where the company saw businesses heading.

“I have been in this industry for over 20 years [and] have worked for several innovative companies,” he said during a keynote speech. “We have spent so much time talking about the optimisation of IT, squeezing every dollar out that we can... but IT as a service is a different way at looking at IT.”

Jackson claimed it was about making IT “easy and efficient” for companies to consume, on top of the cost savings and chief executive (CEO) of VMware, Paul Maritz, said the key to this was automation.

“The innovation that is going to happen down there... is really about automation and management,” he said, following on from his CMO in conference's main keynote.

“It will be a constant theme for our releases going forward... taking resources and really stitching those into a giant computer that can be increasingly automatically managed.”

Maritz claimed although automation was the major push, management would have to act as a “band aid” for old applications on the road to virtualisation and a “renewal” of applications would be needed to get true value from the technology.

“Fundamentally business value comes from the applications and we need to [look] to a renewal of those applications,” he said.

“If you are stuck on [old] applications you are going to have a hard time servicing your customers. You have a generation of consumers [who] expect their information wherever they are, all the time available to them, and business IT is going to have to respond to that.”

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