More than third of businesses to virtualize more than half of servers: survey

About 40 per cent of businesses will virtualize 51-75 per cent of their servers over the next 12 to 24 months, according to a global survey by IDC and Flexera Software.

The Application Usage Management Survey incorporated responses from more than 750 business executives from enterprises across the globe, including Australia, with most (29 per cent) working in the IT industry sector.

“Many IT organisations inundated with managing complex systems and services are operating within tight budget constraints,” said Robert Young, research manager, Enterprise System Management Software at IDC.

“As a result, relying on manual processes to ensure proper software utilisation often adds unnecessary workloads and increased costs for already overwhelmed IT organisations.

“In addition, manual processes for software asset management can be highly error prone resulting in application misutilisation, over/under procurement, and failure to comply with auditory and/or regulatory compliance. These oversights can have significant impacts on user productivity as well as the organisation’s bottom line.”

The survey also found about 40 per cent of respondents will virtualize 1-10 per cent of their desktops over the next two years, and about 35 per cent will virtualize 1-10 per cent of their applications.

The survey also showed the organisations’ progress when it comes to migrating to Windows 7 as the end of Windows XP approaches 8 April 2014. About 52 per cent have migrated 76-100 per cent of their application estates to Windows 7, while 30.5 per cent of organisations have migrated at least 25 to 75 per cent of applications.

Only 3.7 per cent are migrating directly onto Windows 8, and 3.7 per cent have not started migrating from Windows XP at all.