Virtualization Daily

According to SearchSMB.com small to mid-size businesses are more likely to broadly deploy virtualization than larger enterprises.Of course they’re less likely to look at the technology to begin with.

In a recent survey of 1,500 IT professionals, Info-Tech determined that more than 80% of companies with more than 5,000 employees have adopted or plan to adopt virtualization. Smaller companies are less likely to try the technology. About 55% of companies with 101 to 500 employees adopted or planned to adopt. Among companies with 100 or fewer employees the percentage drops to nearly 25%.

But, when they do, they’re also more likely to commit solidly to the technology.

“The initial assumption was that small and medium companies just aren’t using it,” Brudzynski said. “But when we delved into it we found that, sure, larger companies have a larger adoption rate because they all dabble in it. But because of political complexity and risk aversion, on average only 10% of their infrastructure is virtualized.”

Brudzynski said the smaller companies he interviewed tended to take more of an “all-or-nothing” approach to the technology. “They look at all the x86 [servers] that can be consolidated. Small companies that consolidate 60% or 70% of their servers have the ability to dynamically manage resources across all servers. These are the companies that, when we talked to them, gain not only the tangible benefits of saving quite a bit in hardware costs. But they’re also able to take advantage of more of the feature, or intangible, benefits of virtualization — manageability and flexibility.”

There’s nothing surprising in these statements. Smaller businesses are more flexible, not as risk adverse and more financially constrained so virtualization becomes a much easier sell in that environment. The benefits are clear, and the risks are minimal. As more of the consulting firms reaching into that market become familiar with virtualization this trend should continue to increase.