TechWorld recently took the opportunity to speak with IBM's Rich Lechner, VP of Virtualization, when he dropped into the UK on a European tour. Lechner was able to shed some light on both IBM's role within virtualization and where he thinks the technology is headed. Two interesting question and answer sessions follow: Q: What are your customers saying about virtualisation? A: We regularly survey IBM and non-IBM TechWorld recently took the opportunity to speak with IBM’s Rich Lechner, VP of Virtualization, when he dropped into the UK on a European tour. Lechner was able to shed some light on both IBM’s role within virtualization and where he thinks the technology is headed.Two interesting question and answer sessions follow:Q: What are your customers saying about virtualisation? A: We regularly survey IBM and non-IBM customers, and 54 per cent either have or will implement virtualisation this year. For SMBs — that’s companies with under 1,000 employees — the adoption rate is the same as for big enterprises which is very unusual for a new technology. Sixty per cent of all virtualisation engagements are in SMBs and their pain points are same as those of the big customers: cutting costs, consolidation, and handling storage growth while containing IT admin costs. Virtualisation is like a microwave oven — it’s very complex and capable, and it brings rapid ROI with a simple application of the technology. For example, take storage: a customer can justify the cost of virtualisation through a single data migration. Then they can do tiered storage, disaster recovery and so on. And until very recently the drivers have been cost reduction via better utilisation of floor space and so on. But in the last two quarters, customers have been saying that disaster recovery and higher availability are their main drivers, such as failover partitions, VMware’s VMotion, and data replication services. … Q: What challenges can you see ahead for virtualisation? A: The main problems for customers are organisational barriers, such as when they move from physical resources that are owned by divisions within the organisation to a distributed architecture. Departments need to be assured they’ll only pay for what they use — on mainframes we’ve been able to do this for years. Customers are also rapidly realising that management of the virtualisation environment is critical. Firstly, they don’t want physical resources to be divorced from the virtualised environment — in other words, they don’t want a whole new set of management tools; they have enough. Secondly, they want management tools to work across broad physical resources. And thirdly, they want integration of those tools into enterprise management systems such as IBM’s Tivoli. But the single biggest challenge to virtualisation is a lack of skills, whether for those who are or who aren’t doing virtualisation. So we’re educating our services people and those of our partners to design and deploy systems for customers. We’ve also created patterns for virtualisation implementation that customers can follow, such as how to design and implement networking, server selection and so on — it’s not IBM-specific as it’s aimed as accelerating adoption. We had the same problem with Web services and that proved a good template to adapt. And 65 per cent of all customer engagements are led by our business partners, so it’s good news for them. Read the entire question and answer session, here. Software Development