Virtualisation to Dominate Enterprise IT Savings by 2014

Virtualisation investment plans and resulting savings will rise significantly between 2010 and 2014, according to a study of more than 700 CIOs worldwide. The Citrix Virtualisation Index, independently commissioned research, provides a snapshot of how large enterprises view virtualisation.

The report shows that CIOs estimate virtualisation is helping to achieve cost-savings of 16 per cent for the organisation. They expect this to increase to nearly a third (27 per cent) in 2014.

31 per cent of CIOs said between 0-5 per cent of their current IT budget is dedicated to virtualisation technologies. In 2014, the largest proportion of respondents (26 per cent) predicted these technologies would make up a quarter of investment.

The study reveals a CIO focus on creating and delivering an efficient and flexible IT infrastructure over the next four years, acknowledging the need for investment in new technology.

Over the next twelve months 41 per cent of UK companies intend to extend their current use of server virtualisation and almost a third of UK CIOs (27 per cent) will be rolling out desktop virtualisation. In comparison to other countries surveyed, the UK is leading the way in server virtualisation take up, with figures for the US, Germany and Japan at 17%, 13% and 19% respectively.

Significantly, a further 36 per cent of organisations are “evaluating” or “trialling” desktop virtualisation. For server virtualisation this figure sits at 28 per cent.

Only 12 per cent of companies do not yet have some level of virtualisation deployment underway. Nearly two thirds (62.5 per cent) of these companies intend to begin server virtualisation projects in the next 18 months, while a third (33.4 per cent) intend to explore desktop virtualisation in the same time scale.

Although desktop virtualisation is the newer technology, global CIOs recognise the benefits of using it within their organisation. The six most important benefits of desktop virtualisation identified by the Index are:

• Fast desktop deployment (65 per cent)
• Use in any location on any device (64 per cent)
• Data security and access control (62 per cent)
• Reduced total cost of ownership (55 per cent)
• Ease of migration (48 per cent)
• Power savings and/or green computing (35 per cent)

The Citrix Virtualisation Index is an independently conducted survey of 700 CIOs from organisations with more than 500 employees across Canada, Germany, Japan, UK and USA.

Sample size
The primary research findings are based on 700 chief information officers across five countries. 300 were polled in the US, with a further 100 surveyed in each of the other four countries: Canada, Germany, Japan and the UK. The research was conducted independently by Vanson Bourne in November 2009.