Virtualization can improve operations with new ways of enabling consolidation. It now has moved beyond consolidating “like to like”—keeping all development systems together, production systems together or databases together, for example. It is now possible to consolidate dissimilar applications—Web applications with databases, for instance—in ways that were simply not possible before.

Virtualization’s ability to consolidate dissimilar applications also creates an unprecedented freedom of choice. Just as the Linux® operating system and Java™ technologies freed applications from being tied to specific hardware platforms, virtualization enables organizations to leverage existing infrastructures to mix and match technologies.

With virtualization, organizations need not fear that they are locking themselves into a single vendor—or locking themselves out of technologies that may become available in the future.

The role is virtualization is expanding to become an important technology that can help you create a more efficient platform for delivering cloud based services Cloud Computing is an emerging paradigm that can be used as a vehicle for unleashing business innovation and agility.

The method of deployment will vary from organizations wanting to subscribe to services over a Public Cloud to those that want to set-up their own Private Cloud for delivering services to their employees and customers to hybrid models where both methods are used.

We see virtualization, together with Service Management, as essential technologies that will help bolster the ability of IT organizations to become a provider of Cloud-based services. The Cloud service provider will apply technologies and approaches such as virtualization (at all layers of the architecture) to assure that they are able to pool and share their resources to provide rapid delivery, isolation, flexibility, etc. of service. They will also seek to implement Service Management capability to assure the delivery of Cloud services. (For example they would want to assure performance, availability, change management, for these services.)

We would expect that in the organizations of the future, you will find highly virtualized infrastructures coupled with Service Management used for delivery of a myriad of business and IT services over a myriad of architectures, from dedicated workload pools, to private Cloud solutions to standardized services subscribed through Public Clouds to federated Clouds comprised of potentially dynamic combinations of infrastructures. Virtualization will enable agile infrastructure around the world to provide more choices for organizations based on service quality requirements, like security and performance, privacy restrictions, compliance requirements and other factors.

Three primary factors have been developing over the past decade - : (Increasing cost of quality) Organizations have been mostly addressing Quality challenges through labor arbitrage. With the rise in global labor wages, outsourcing and off shoring testing strategies as a way to drive down the cost of software development has reached its practical end of life and is no longer sufficient. Putting it simply, a 13% increase in wages in India this year roughly translated to the same kind of growth in spending for QA for many organizations.

Today’s applications and manufactured products are increasingly complex. They comprise an unprecedented level of connectivity and dependency between systems, processes and infrastructure. Whether deployed in traditional software development or cloud environments, businesses are able to create products, systems and services that are increasingly instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. While better development tools & middleware is fueling this innovation and growth, it also creates unprecedented challenges to test these composite applications, while keeping pace with development teams, and requires significant costs to stand up test environments: The typical cost for a test lab at a F500 is now typically ranging from $5 to $30M. And not only the cost of test labs has been increasing but their number is also increasing dramatically. In the last 5 years one of large FSS customer saw their number of test labs increase 6 fold.

Historically, businesses have had to balance their ability to deliver quality against speed/time to market. Over the past several years, software development teams have been finding new and innovative ways to drive down cost while increasing their flexibility and productivity through agile development. Test teams can no longer keep up with development’s increased agility and the velocity at which they deliver working software code to be tested. Traditional testing is showing its limits.