Small business attitudes to Virtualization

Check out this interesting post talking about a survey which explores small businesses attitude towards virtualization sponsored by Dell and Intel. I see there appear to be differences in adoption and comfort with virtualization dependent on the size of the company, you can read all about it here.

Organizations interest in virtualization is going to depend on a number of factors, for me (when I speak to SMB’s) what seemed to matter was total cost, complexity and in house knowledge. Organizations and entrepreneurs wanted the same technologies, applications and services that the enterprise were able to leverage, were more open to using different ways of procuring them, but understood their own operational and technical limitations in doing so.  Put simply by a friend:”It’s about managing the benefit switching to that platform might give me, with any training costs, against buying it in as a service, ‘down a wire if you like…”

Each small business, each target market and user community have different drivers, different levels of integration and interest in technology and how it can work for them, for the mobile car mechanic his Mobile or Blackberry might be his business, for the small Consultancy, it might be their client database, their SharePoint and their web site. Each therefore has different levels of technical requirements and buy-in to their own IT and how it works for them. We need to manage the agility and empowerment platforms can bring with that all important phrase as described by dad “if it was your money, what would you choose?”.

There’s a brilliant post all about it on the Dell site, do check it out.

Category: Cloud, Servers, Virtualisation, VMWare