Q&A with Zohar Gilad of Precise

VSM: Precise just conducted a survey about application virtualization. What did the survey uncover?

ZG: The first finding is that by far, enterprise customers are voting for private cloud. This is not surprising, given the perception that the public cloud isn't yet enterprise grade when it comes to security and service levels. The second interesting outcome is that enterprise applications are transitioning to the cloud much faster than a year ago. Migration of critical applications to virtual and cloud environments has now surpassed single-digit numbers. The third top trend from the survey is that people's number-one concern of virtualization is performance and being able to effectively troubleshoot problems.

VSM: What was the most surprising survey result?

ZG: People are moving to the cloud in droves for agility, yet they recognize the risk in making it work all the time. After slow performance (41%), the second leading problem of managing applications in the cloud, as reported by IT managers, is slow time to identify the root cause of issues. When I meet with customers, their response is the same. The CIO is between the rock and the hard place. On one hand, IT needs to keep grinding down the infrastructure unit cost by moving to virtualization technologies. Meanwhile, IT must keep enterprise applications running smoothly, all the time. Enterprise IT customers realize the inherent risks in moving to the cloud, and they are willing to pay for managing that risk. It's kind of like having insurance for the 24X7 performance of your cloud applications.

VSM: How closely does the survey mirror conversations that you have with customers regarding both adoption of virtualization and related challenges?

ZG: The survey is on the money. It doesn't really change our roadmap. We are committed to helping our customers get the highest performance from their enterprise applications, particularly as they transition to the cloud.

VSM: Based on the survey, and others you’ve seen lately, how would you characterize the maturing of virtualization in the enterprise? For instance, the survey shows strong migration of front-office and business applications, which would indicate that virtualization has become more trusted and mainstream.

ZG: One year or 18 months ago, the adoption level was in the low teens and single digits. Today, we see much higher percentages of people moving applications to the cloud. One-third of the survey participants said that they will move finance, ERP, and/or HR applications to the cloud by 2012. Now, companies are beginning to go through those transition pains. The jury is still out on TCO of the cloud, yet I believe that public clouds are cheaper in many ways than previous computing infrastructures. As it's always been, however, the primary enterprise driver to the cloud is agility; it is so much faster to provision your infrastructure as application and business demand scales up and down. Expected cost savings is the second driver, and that will continue.