Everyone is well aware of the recent market turbulence and the pressure this will put on corporate spending. The economic situation is going to have an effect on every aspect of business action. However, despite budget cuts, I think that the increase in virtualization adoption will continue unabated. Here are a few things I expect:

• Since the beginning of 2008, the virtualization industry has seen changes in its landscape. Microsoft’s Hyper-V introduction has made a lot of noise, as more and more customers are seeing and trying it for themselves. One of the big draws for Hyper-V is its price point. In this market, its price will continue to make it an attractive solution. In fact, I believe the price will dip even further by year’s end, keeping it in consideration for enterprises as other solutions are ditched to shore up costs. As additional vendors support Hyper-V it will only become easier for companies to evaluate, justify, and acquire the solution.

• I believe that not only will Hyper-V demand continue, but people will also begin to adopt more than one hypervisor. Almost all companies have more than one operating system or hardware platform. Since IT departments are adapt at integrating heterogeneous technologies, it is only natural for companies to mix and match hypervisors to solve the specific challenges they have while meeting budget requirements.

• In general, many of the companies that made initial virtualization-related purchases capitalized on its “low-hanging fruit.” Most Fortune 1000 companies have already completed relatively low risk actions and virtualized applications like dev and test systems and file and print. Moving forward, I think that customers will now want to implement virtualization on more of their mission-critical applications. Applications like Exchange and SQL, which both have growing needs for high availability solutions.

• Expect the interest level and the actual deployment of both higher-end availability technology and sophisticated management tools, and the infrastructure that surrounds that, to quickly ratchet up. This will allow people to complete the first phase of adoption and will begin a speedier move towards mainstream inclusion of virtual technology in data centers.

How do you think the rest of the year will play out in the virtualization industry? Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts; I’m interested to hear the insights of others.

A few week’s ago I wrote about virtualization in large enterprises – chronicling conversations I’ve had with Fortune 100 CEOs and CIOs. Following Jerry’s Mid-Market podcast, I thought I would chime in with my thoughts on virtualization in the Mid-Market; especially since the introduction of products like Hyper-V will increase mainstream adoption at the Mid-Market level significantly.

Mid-Market companies have completely different drivers for adopting virtualization than the larger companies. The key question for Mid-Market level CIOs is “can I consolidate everything?” Most large companies have the ability to segment out the applications they want to virtualize and allocate the appropriate staff to pull it off in a phased approach. Mid-Market companies lack that luxury. They are often times short staffed and have little resources to conduct this sort of deployment. And in many cases, if they can’t consolidate all of the apps, the return doesn’t pencil out.

Why haven’t more Mid-Market companies deployed server virtualization?

One of the first and foremost concerns on the mind of Mid-Market CIO’s I’ve talked to is that they want to be sure that they are going to be able to get and provide the same service as before. Keeping business critical applications like Exchange and SQL up and running, not only effects employees, but also customers and partners as well.

Another major concern which has prohibited Mid-Market companies from deploying is the idea that there are specialized skills required to maintain a virtual environment. This should not be a concern. While some virtualization platforms do require specialized IT skills, new platforms such as Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V can realistically be deployed without an army of IT folks or a lot of specialized virtualization skills.

If you’re a Mid-Market company facing a virtualization hurdle, leave me a comment here. We would gladly dive-in to see if we can help you get over it.