* A look at the messaging virtualization market
We have just completed a major survey of the market for messaging virtualization and will shortly publish the results of that research. Here are some highlights of what we found:
* IT decision-makers’ knowledge about virtualization has a long way to go: 34% of these decision makers have, at best, only a modest understanding of how virtualization could be used for e-mail server applications, while 37% have this level of knowledge about how virtualization could be used for storage systems (Compare Storage Virtualization products).
* Similarly, nearly two-thirds of IT decision-makers are no more than modestly aware of the existence of commercial or open-source virtual appliances for messaging functions.
* Non-IT decision-makers know far less about virtualization and the business benefits it can provide: 83% have no more than a modest knowledge of how virtualization could benefit their organization.
* Today, under 10% of e-mail servers are running as virtual servers, but decision-makers anticipate rapid growth in the use of virtualization for e-mail servers during the next two years. Similar growth rates will occur for security and mobility servers.
Why should you be interested in virtualization? There are several reasons. Virtualization can significantly reduce hardware and related costs by allowing multiple servers to run on the same hardware platform. For example, an e-mail or unified communications server, a security server and a mobile messaging server could all run on the same physical server, significantly reducing hardware requirements, IT labor requirements and power consumption.
Virtualization can make it much easier to add additional capacity to the existing infrastructure. Disaster recovery and business continuity can be improved because virtualization makes it easier and more affordable to add redundant capacity to the infrastructure. Maintenance tasks can be made easier.
In short, virtualization makes it easier for organizations to add and manage e-mail and unified communications capabilities (Compare Unified Communications products).
