Saugatuck On Adoption Of IT Utility Inside Enterprises

In less than four years, 60% of enteprises are expected to be engaged in various phases of IT virtualization. The IT Utility, the virtual reality of utility computing is making serious inroads into the mind share and in some cases the wallet share of the CIO's. By definition, the reach of this framework spans from servers, storage, client, networks with facilities for provisioning and dynamically allocating paths and resources that come into interplay.

The true value of an IT utility is its agility and flexibility and yet getting that done in an economical and timely manner is a hard task for even the most forward looking enterprise in the world. The challenges in embracing virtualization solutions are many and these get compounded by the fact that like a scholarly study, the more you dive into it, the results begin to show in a progressive way with most of the benefits show up late in the implementation cycle. This process of migration for a large enterprise may take several months and in some cases years to get completed. For such a daunting task, there are not many well defined approaches sans the one made available by vendors - which are intrinsically more focussed on parts of the IT utility and not the whole infrastructure. This makes it look that the path towards enterprse virtualization may look more like an art or skill while it needs to be a wholistic approached solidified with a proven apporoach. Saugatech's just released report titled, "The IT Utility: Journey to a virtual reality" fills that void perfectly.

The report correctly identifies that the virtualisation journey would have to be managed at various phases with varying emphasis and brings in a perspective about the metrics and addressing security concerns. Saugatech' s position is that systems management in an IT utility environment is, in fact, the single largest support and management problem to be faced in establishing and maintaining an IT Utility - the insightful report points out that problems can satart from planning , implementation, change management and attitude towards shared resources. It comes with an excellent set of recommendations for users, vendors and service providers. Detailed discussions about the challenges and inhibitors in adopting IT Utility, the relationship between IT Utility & Grid computing, the role of SaaS in IT Utility, the impact of open source given its success in the infrastructure space, make this a very rich and absorbing report to read. After all virtualization may prove to be amongst the best return providers on CIOs investment - given that this is directed at the sunk investment inside enteprises and can potentially unlock quite a lot of value from these. With virtualization becoming a key theme in every enterprise, this report is a must read and in fact a good reference along the journey for CIO's ,Business executives, vendors & service providers..