As an engineer, it’s often tempting to focus on the “new cool stuff”. And also as an engineer, the new cool items are often rather esoteric — new capabilities or features that people outside of our field can’t readily comprehend (simply as they don’t do this stuff every day – quick, tell me how DRS subgroups affect your licensing costs). I got thinking about this last week while at a meeting where Varrow had the honor of presenting about virtualization to a fairly business-focused audience (CIO, IT managers, Line of Business managers, etc). These are very smart people (they wouldn’t have the jobs they do otherwise) but they’re not focused on the nuts and bolts of IT and sometimes aren’t aware of the specific efficiencies they could drive internally through more effective use of technology.

While Jeremiah Cook (Varrow co-founder, good presenter, plus overall smart dude) was primarily presenting (with occasional interjections on my part), I started thinking about what things business people care about when it comes to virtualization. If you’d like a full treatment on this topic, I’d recommend a subscription to Gartner….but consider this a “Virtualization for Business 101” series.

I’m hoping this series will be useful in 2 ways.

1. For Technical People who want to help their coworkers or managers understand why this “virtualization thing” isn’t just cool but can actually have substantial business impact.
2. For Business People who keep reading “virtualization this and that” in the news and want to understand what this could do for their business.

Spoiler Alert 1 – what if you could quickly know the answer when someone in the business calls the Helpdesk to say “the network is slow”?

Spoiler Alert 2 – what if you could deploy a new server within minutes or hours?

Spoiler Alert 3 – what if you could provision new desktops within minutes in a fully automated fashion?

Spoiler Alert 4 – what if you could implement reasonably priced technology to avoid both unplanned AND planned system downtime?

Now here’s the scary part — what if your competition is already doing this?

While I’ve left all the actual content for future posts, I am hoping to focus on one overarching theme. What if IT could enable your business to be more flexible and dynamic in responding to market and competitive forces?

At its core, IT is about enabling the business to do more. Virtualization simply takes that core principle and steps on the gas.