That leads to what I call virtual appliances—not just software types, but the actual hardware and software combined. This is where you get things like Cisco's [Application Control Engine] product, which is part of its application-oriented networking, and IBM's DataPower. You create a virtual address into it; and the appliance gives you routing, transformation and integration services. The more you use those, the better control, more abstraction and less of a footprint in the data center you get, too.

The final thing to track is how you use virtualization to start creating information as a service.

If you're going to create a virtual information environment, where you can expose that to be a service you can call upon at different points in time with different requirements, you're going to see the Oracles and IBMs of the world and then some leading companies like Composite Software provide a way to physically abstract from the data environment (so, from the databases themselves) and make that available. Do you do that in memory as a single abstraction, or do you do that as a collection that's distributed over the environment?

This is where you see technologies like Oracle's Coherence, and IBM's information framework caching product. That's one layer. A second layer becomes something like the Composite Software [suite] that lets you do a federated join of information from multiple sources without having to hard code that.

So, how would all of this come into play within an enterprise?

Let's say you're a bank, and you have information about customer "Beth" in 12 different places. Beth not only has a credit card and checking and savings accounts; she also has CDs, a home equity line, a personal line of credit and a mortgage. Those accounts cross maybe three or four businesses lines. So, how do you get a single view of a customer so you can do analysis? Say Beth is using her credit cards and checking account more often than her line of credit. But if she used her line of credit, which is only at 5% interest rate vs. the 18% she's paying on her credit card, I could get her to consume even more; and maybe she'd leave her deposits in the bank account longer, which we then could leverage.

This is a business scenario that says, 'How do I use virtualization of information without having to create a new data warehouse that would take me years to build at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars?' If I could pull that information together in seconds and have it be as up-to-date as repositories are up-to-date, then wouldn't that allow me to make better decisions on how to market and provide service to that individual? Virtualization allows you to do powerful things that you couldn't do in the past.