2008 is going to see further attention to a wider range of virtualisation technologies. At Hydrasight, we've just started to publish our trends for the coming year. What follows is selected highlights in regard to virtualisation.

VMware's unassailable position in server virtualisation will continue through at least 2012. By this time, more than a third of workloads on industry-standard Intel/AMD enterprise servers will be virtualised. Citrix and Oracle will not make significant inroads into the enterprise data centre due to a lack of proven enterprise management capability, nor will Microsoft.

Beyond server virtualisation, IT organisations will increasingly explore differing layers of virtualisation within the technology stack including storage, desktop, information and application. This will inevitably lead to greater confusion.

Desktop virtualisation will receive increasing focus—particularly as Windows Vista deployments start to increase during 2008—but it will struggle to find widely-deployable usage scenarios that can be successfully maintained over the longer term.

For many similar reasons, application virtualisation will also gain some interest as a means to ‘control’ and integrate key desktop application environments although large-scale enterprise deployments will remain rare before at least 2009. Microsoft SoftGrid will be a key technology to watch in that space.

At a more abstract level, information virtualisation will continue to be pursued through a variety of discrete technologies and projects including portal, customer relationship management (CRM), customer data hubs/customer data integration, the enterprise data/service bus, business intelligence and data warehousing projects amongst others. The leading organisations will begin to incorporate virtualised information objects within a range of platforms, applications and infrastructure in order to achieve the greatest benefit. This will remain in stark contrast to the remaining organisations who will continue to focus on creating ever-more complex ‘uber taxonomies’, particularly as part of data warehousing or business intelligence projects.

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