Regardless of your vertical market, you’ve heard the buzz surrounding virtualization. Over the past couple of years, there hasn’t been a hotter topic. That’s because what it promises is so tantalizing: unprecedented agility to respond to market changes, a goal on every CTO’s shortlist.

Virtualization separates the physical from the logical, decoupling software applications from their hard-coded dependency on underlying hardwareand allowing them to be assembled and managed in the most efficient way.In areas such as server consolidation, by using virtualization to run existing applications far more efficiently on a fewer number of physical servers, companies are saving millions.But even more importantly than the cost savings, virtualization delivers flexibility, mobility and availability almost immediately, allowing IT and end users to focus on the business. IT is no longer a limiting factor, but a business enabler.

The real virtualization revolution lies ahead—enabling IT to connect users and applications in a way that propels the business. In fact, Gartner recently adjusted its forecast about virtualization adoption, which is accelerating faster than the leading analyst firm previously thought. In its new estimate, Gartner predicts virtualization will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012.

Enabling Application Delivery Infrastructure
Virtualization is increasingly viewed as a core enabler of application delivery because it allows the components of computing to become dynamic building blocks. Once these components are freed from all other constraints, they can be reassembled in a very interesting way—ensuring the best delivery experience regardless of how often the variables on the user or application side of the equation change.

Without this flexibility, IT is often forced to massively over-provision, buying too much bandwidth, adding too many servers and refreshing PCs on an increasingly short life cycle just to keep up with growing application requirements. And there are many: IT executives faced with 21st-century business challenges such as globalization and offshoring are focused on ways to connect users and applicationsin a way that improves performance, reduces risk and increases their ability to keep pace with business requirements in an ever more dynamic world.

Making it Work—From the Data Center to the Desktop
Citrix has long used virtualization technologies at the user tier of applications: more than 180,000 companies already enjoy the benefits of application virtualization with Citrix XenApp to deliver Windows applications to their end users. However, the benefits of virtualization are beginning to extend even further.

“Citrix acquired XenSource last year and promised to deliver virtualization from datacenter to desktop,” wrote CNET’s Jon Oltsik in a February blog post. “Citrix took a giant step in this direction with the introduction of a new architecture called Citrix Delivery Center. The beauty of Delivery Center is that it is a one-stop shop combining the desktop, server, network and application.”  

With the addition of XenServer—a key component of the Citrix Delivery Center—Citrix has become the first to offer a true end-to-end virtualization solution.End-to-end virtualization delivers applications to end users with high performance while ensuring that IT is efficient, manageable and secure.“Citrix’s new end-to-end virtualization offerings augments the company’s application delivery strategy and represents the foundational components of the future application delivery environment,” said John Humphreys, IDC program vice president.

By enabling IT to control applications, desktops and the server infrastructure that supports them from the data center, Citrix Delivery Center offers the broadest and best virtualization for application delivery.

Thinking About Virtualization? Consider This.
To realize the full benefits of virtualization, to move beyond, say, data center consolidation, start thinking about virtualization as a strategy, not a project.

“I hope organizations aren’t getting into virtualization just because all the cool kids are doing it,” said Gordon Haff, principal IT advisor at Illuminata, in a recent podcast.‘It’s important to first determine what you’re trying to accomplish with it.’

Take a holistic, end-to-end approach—or risk being saddled with technology that technically works, but doesn’t solve any big business problems. Emphasize simplicity. And don’t forget the reason for all your efforts: the applications. In an era when the application is king, you need a meaningful way to connect users to the applications that drive business.

“The area in which virtualization really moves beyond where it is in the marketplace today is when it starts getting applied to strategic business problems,” said Wes Wasson, Citrix senior vice president and chief marketing officer.“Nobody deploys virtualization technology for the fun of managing it or for the short-term cost savings. They are applying virtualization because they have very strategic business problems that are core to the fundamentals of running the business.”

Learn more about how virtualization enables dramatic improvements in responsiveness and economics—and helps IT become a competitive advantage. Listen in on a Business Trends Quarterly executive podcast.

Hear the Virtualization Podcast