Yes, partly. People do love to adopt technology that is easy to implement, works relatively well and has some good concepts to it. But this breaks down at organizations that are not looking at end-to-end service delivery and using that to drive how they build, design, implement and transform.

How does one go about changing a virtualization strategy from a bottom-up to a top-down approach?

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Three things must occur. First, you need to virtualize at the demand layer. You have to understand what the user is asking for, what the application needs, where the destination is and where to do the processing, based on what's being asked.

Then you need to virtualize all types of supply-the network, storage, compute, memory and I/O. You need a strategy for ensuring that every single component is virtualized. You can't have your virtual servers over here, but leave everything else physical.

The third step is to incorporate life-cycle management of the virtualization platform, which to me means the virtualized demand and virtualized supply combined and the service life-cycle. I need to sustain the life of that business with this virtualized demand matched with the virtual resources; and understand how they're matched, managed and provisioned.

If I look at the user experience and my processes, can I ask, 'Where am I not meeting the needs of the business, in terms of performance, cost or efficiency?' If you think of those three factors, and then decompose your most critical business processes and look at where you're not meeting those business needs, you can prioritize your road map.

Then, from the bottom up, you want to understand what you have. That's where you use a tool like Tideway Systems' [Foundation, which] tells you the physical inventory and the dependencies of your existing infrastructure. You're able to understand how every system interconnects, down from the network and up to the application. That's powerful, especially because then, when you virtualize and add changes, it can show you the new dependencies. Now, when you come bottom-up, with 'what do I have' and 'where can I target opportunities to virtualize,' you can understand what that would do to the infrastructure. Then, if you use a tool like OpTier's [CoreFirst], which shows you user transactions as they evolve through the platform—not a simulation, that user-experience view, correlated with what's actually happening or with what I have, allows me to say, now, if I virtualize both the demand and the supply, now look at what I can optimize.