As 2008 comes to a close, server virtualization, by all accounts, has graduated from being limited to research and development activities to supporting some of the most important corporate activities. In fact, 2009 may very well be the Year of Virtualization as organizations strive to reduce IT costs, stretch tight budgets and conserve space.

Virtualization is booming. In fact, virtualization license shipments for the second quarter of 2008 increased 53 percent over the prior quarter and were up 72 percent over the same quarter last year, according to Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker published in October 2008 by IDC, a market research firm in Framingham, Mass. Meanwhile, mission critical applications are becoming more common on these platforms. In fact, 56 percent of applications on virtualized servers are deemed mission critical, compared to only 36 percent in 2007, according to the IT Disaster Recovery survey released by Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec Corp. in August 2008.

Meanwhile, vendors are introducing a broad range of technologies that bring standard capabilities from the physical server world to the virtualized realm. In moving mission critical applications to virtualized environments, organizations quickly realized the need for data backup, management tools, storage capabilities and more.

With these developments, the door is open wide for solution providers to bring a solid virtualization strategy to customers. In a squeezed economy, the good news is virtualization can boost server utilization from the single digits to levels as great as 80 percent, a source of relief for increasingly tight IT budgets. Similarly impressive results can be achieved in the areas of power and cooling costs. In addition, application virtualization can reduce total cost of ownership by 30 to 70 percent.

These statistics combined with new technology options from hardware and software vendors give solution providers have an excellent opportunity to launch a conversation with existing and potential customers and position themselves as a proactive and critical member of the IT organization.