Virtualization in SMBs future 25 October, 2006 By Vanessa Ho

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"80 per cent of our revenue comes through the channel and we have over 3000 VARs over the world. So, the channel is a huge part of our success," said Parag Patel, VMware senior director of alliances, during a one-on-one interview.

With over 20,000 customers and three million individual users worldwide as of last year, Patel is seeing VMware has no longer being part of the early adopter phase but being more mainstream.

"The whole idea of virtualization is efficiency and reducing the cost and complexity of computing. This message is powerful and with the economy slowing down, cutting IT cost is important for every company," said Patel.

He added that for the channel, virtualization is a way for them to go to their customers and offer a way to reduce the cost and complexity of their data centers.

"If a [channel partner] gets a SMB to adopt VMware software and the customer gets comfortable with the technology, then the channel has up-sale opportunities in the future with that customer," Patel said.

Aside from cost and consolidation, another area that virtualization has helped companies, Patel said, is increasing server capacity utilization. He noted an IDC study that said only nine per cent of server capacity is being utilized with 90 per cent of it sitting idle.

And this is where the channel can come in and help.

"A lot of VARs and channels can go to its customers, whether large or small, to assess how well are they using their servers, storage and IT infrastructure to figure out end-user capacity and come up with a plan to consolidate," said Patel. Part of this consolidation could involve isolating the different virtual machines that sit on the same server from each other so in case one fails, the others will not be affected.

With virtualization, companies can reduce hardware costs dramatically and increase its IT infrastructure capacity up to 90 per cent. The ROI for a VMware investment, said Patel, is about four months.

As for the future of virtualization, Patel is seeing more vendors, such as Microsoft, coming out with its own products and believes the technology will become pervasive in most companies' IT environments before the end of the decade.