Insight from Interactions

The virtualized datacenter once seemed like science fiction. But as it turns out (once again) fiction becomes reality much sooner than expected, as virtualization solutions already are fast becoming the de-facto standard for many organizations.

The ability to virtualize hardware and applications isn’t all that new—in fact, it’s been around since the late 1960s. But it seems that an increasing number of organizations are moving their infrastructure onto virtualized platforms. VMware’s Vsphere 4 is a good example. It was released about a year ago, but at first customers chose to keep it in their labs while still running their legacy production environments. However, in the last few months, we see more organizations moving their production environments to virtualized platforms, primarily due to significant performance benefits.

Virtualization presents a new opportunity for vendors to offer considerable cost savings and much greater system availability to customers. At NICE, we are working hand-in-hand with virtualization vendors such as Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware to test our specific components, and draft resource requirements and detailed deployments guidelines for virtual machines. Customers greet these developments with much enthusiasm. I believe we are just at the beginning of the virtualization age, which will spread much deeper into the call center and trading floor market, and will eventually transform the way datacenters are deployed and managed. It will be quite a sight to behold.