Chalfont - Virtualisation investment plans and resulting savings will rise significantly between 2010 and 2014, according to a study of more than 700 CIOs worldwide. The Citrix Virtualisation Index, independently commissioned research, provides a snapshot of how large enterprises view virtualisation.

The report shows that CIOs estimate virtualisation is helping to achieve cost-savings of 16 per cent for the organisation. They expect this to increase to nearly a third (27 per cent) in 2014.

31 per cent of CIOs said between 0-5 per cent of their current IT budget is dedicated to virtualisation technologies. In 2014, the largest proportion of respondents (26 per cent) predicted these technologies would make up a quarter of investment.

The study reveals a CIO focus on creating and delivering an efficient and flexible IT infrastructure over the next four years, acknowledging the need for investment in new technology.

Over the next twelve months 41 per cent of UK companies intend to extend their current use of server virtualisation and almost a third of UK CIOs (27 per cent) will be rolling out desktop virtualisation. In comparison to other countries surveyed, the UK is leading the way in server virtualisation take up, with figures for the US, Germany and Japan at 17%, 13% and 19% respectively.

Significantly, a further 36 per cent of organisations are “evaluating” or “trialling” desktop virtualisation. For server virtualisation this figure sits at 28 per cent.

Only 12 per cent of companies do not yet have some level of virtualisation deployment underway. Nearly two thirds (62.5 per cent) of these companies intend to begin server virtualisation projects in the next 18 months, while a third (33.4 per cent) intend to explore desktop virtualisation in the same time scale.

Although desktop virtualisation is the newer technology, global CIOs recognise the benefits of using it within their organisation. The six most important benefits of desktop virtualisation identified by the Index are:

• Fast desktop deployment (65 per cent)
• Use in any location on any device (64 per cent)
• Data security and access control (62 per cent)
• Reduced total cost of ownership (55 per cent)
• Ease of migration (48 per cent)
• Power savings and/or green computing (35 per cent)

James Stevenson, area vice-president for UK and Ireland at Citrix commented: “Virtualisation is a major force for change, and our findings demonstrate the value the technology can deliver to tomorrow’s enterprise, both in terms of cost and efficiency.”

“It’s positive to see the server virtualisation market, although not new, is still up for grabs, with over 60 per cent of businesses looking to implement solutions over the next 18 months.

“In the main however, 2010 is set to be the year of desktop virtualisation - the tipping point when CIOs move beyond trials to adopt the technology as part of their organisation wide IT strategy.”

“It will be interesting to see how attitudes and outlooks have developed when the Index is re-run in six months time. I expect to see even further plans put in place around virtualisation solutions and, as time develops, the allying of any residual fears associated with the technology.”

Martin Ingram, VP of strategy, at user environment management vendor AppSense, said; “The survey results confirm what we are seeing in the market. AppSense software has been used in many of the early desktop virtualisation trials and we now see substantial momentum building in both customer organisations and systems integrators. Many organisations are using their Windows 7 migration to rethink how they deliver desktops to users and hence embracing desktop virtualisation. By choosing to use desktop virtualisation in their migration strategies organisations can simplify both this and future migrations.

“The days when desktop virtualisation was a technical curiosity are now behind us, the technology is mature and organisations understand the benefits. We see significant momentum to broad deployments of fully personalised virtual desktops,” concluded Ingram.

Pierre Hall, solutions director, at IT services and solutions provider, Computacenter, a Citrix Platinum partner, said: “Cost savings will definitely be one of the main drivers for virtualisation deployments over the coming years, but organisations must ensure they deploy end-to-end virtualisation solutions that will not only update legacy systems, but also reduce TCO and enable rapid ROI.

“In terms of take up, in particular we are seeing many of the desktop virtualisation pilots that were implemented last year moving into full-scale production. Over the next six months we expect to see a substantial increase in the number of virtual desktops as customers realise there are tangible savings to be made from this technology platform, particularly around flexibility and data assurance,” concluded Hall.

The Citrix Virtualisation Index is an independently conducted survey of 700 CIOs from organisations with more than 500 employees across Canada, Germany, Japan, UK and USA.

Virtualisation definitions – for this study

Server virtualisation: Partitioning a physical server computer into multiple servers such that each has the appearance and capabilities of running on its own ‘virtual’ dedicated machine.

Desktop virtualisation: Virtualisation technologies that affect the end-user computing environment, across any device, including VDI, streaming desktop, application virtualisation (through hosting or streaming), local virtualisation of desktops and user-profile management.

Sample size

The primary research findings are based on 700 chief information officers across five countries. 300 were polled in the US, with a further 100 surveyed in each of the other four countries: Canada, Germany, Japan and the UK. The research was conducted independently by Vanson Bourne in November 2009.