By Roger Pilc

Virtualization can deliver wonderful benefits. The technology, which lets companies partition a single hardware server into multiple virtual machines, can deliver a long, impressive list of both technology and business improvements. Just to give a few examples, CIOs can use virtualization to consolidate physical resources, simplify deployment and administration, reduce electric power and cooling needs, improve their organization's agility, and dramatically increase efficiencies.

The last two benefits on that short list are now extremely important. In today's economy, CIOs are being asked as never before to select and implement superior IT systems. They're also being asked to help lead their organizations through these unsettled times with little or no increase in either investment or headcount.

An organization's agility to respond to changing market conditions has never been more important, and virtualization can help. Virtualization can improve the organization's flexibility to allocate resources where they are most needed — and make better use of IT infrastructure investments. In fact, it should be no surprise that greater agility is virtualization's top driver. Virtualization can also help CIOs improve their organization's efficiencies, another high priority during economic turbulence.

Benefits Await
Yet to gain these benefits in full, CIOs must further exploit this technology as a strategic architecture. To date, that's not happening. Instead, virtualization use is limited largely to server and storage-centric deployments—the tip of a very large iceberg. Areas such as desktop and application virtualization can transcend IT silos and offer end-to-end service efficiencies, management and business impact. To reap the full benefits of virtualization and reach the technology's tipping point, CIOs need to deploy the technology on a grand scale.