Is the mere fact of being a startup a strike against a virtualization vendor?

Are IT leaders less afraid of virtualization startups than any other startups?

My impression, based on my many conversations with IT leaders about virtualization, is that because this is such a game-changing technology for your organizations, you are more willing to look past the bigs. You are more willing to consider virtualization startups than other startups.

For example, your overall architecture plans (and perhaps your key vendors in those plans) may be changing. Also, you need to move fast to solve tactical challenges with virtualization projects. If a startup can solve your load-balancing problem, bring it on. Even your IT team's structure is changing. As CIOs like First American's Evan Jafa have learned, it makes sense to bring together a team that includes members from various IT disciplines to plan the enterprise virtualization effort. Your storage gurus have different favorite vendors than your networking gurus, and both sets of gurus are working together in new ways. This helps open the door for new vendors.

But I want to road test my impressions, with those of you in the midst of virtualization efforts, and in the midst of being pitched by both the bigs and the startups on virtualization products. Are you treating virtualization startups less skeptically than other startups? If so, that's even more bad news for Mr. Big. Let me know what you think.

Laurianne McLaughlin has served as technology editor for CIO and CIO.com since 2006, with virtualization as a primary area of coverage. McLaughlin, a technology journalist since 1992, previously served as a senior editor for IDG's PC World magazine and for Business 2.0 online. She has won numerous ASBPE (American Society of Business Publication Editors) awards for her writing and editing work at PC World and CIO. Her freelance work has appeared in venues including Macworld, Network World, MIT Technology Review, Yahoo!, and IEEE publications.