VMware Survey Shows Australians Embrace Virtualisation

October 3, 2007: Virtualisation software provider, VMware has released the results of a survey of 300 organisations across Australia which show a strong uptake in Virtualisation software.

The survey has shown that server consolidation was the primary driving force for virtualisation take up, with 79% of respondents. Server utilisation was second with 70% of respondents, but assumedly those who responded in favour of consolidation were naturally concerned with utilisation as well.

By VMware’s own admission the research has been conducted by the company themselves, so you wouldn’t expect the results to be negative and damaging. What is an interesting feature of the research is that more then 91 percent of organisation surveyed claimed to be familiar with virtualisation technology.

“The study shows that virtualisation is the forefront of the minds of business and IT leaders in Australia” said VMware’s ANZ Managing Director Paul Harapin.

Things haven’t been completely perfect in the virtualisation stakes though, with various barriers to entry causing companies to be hesitant to take the first step into a virtualised environment. These barriers include in-house expertise concerns with 53.3% and the remaining factors of lack of financial benefit, internal stakeholder resistance and perceived risk all tied at 35.3%.

This isn’t phasing VMware though, as according to Harapin when organisations are shown what they can achieve with VMware, that barrier is easily overcome.

Other features to emerge from the survey include 15%of organisations deplopying virtual machines for low-risk, non-critical applications and 36% of respondents planning to run applications in the future on virtual machines, some of these to include mission-critical applications.

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