BANGALORE, INDIA: Trends say, virtualization has taken off in style and is the latest buzzword in the IT industry. This 'not-so-new' technology, (virtualization has been around for quite sometime, precisely over a decade now), unlike many of its counterparts, could not gain traction until recently, owing to various reasons. Today, it is an inevitable part of a company's IT strategy and every company recognizes the need to be virtualized.

Shantanu Ghosh, VP, product operations, Symantec India, says: “Owing to the proliferation of devices in Indian enterprises, more and more companies are showing interest in endpoint virtualization.”

He talks at length, in an interview with CIOL, about what made the technology to take a backseat all this while and how it rose to prominence in the recession-hit environment. Excerpts:

CIOL: What calls for the latest buzz - endpoint virtualization?

Shantanu Ghosh: Endpoint virtualization in some form or the other - application virtualization, application streaming, desktop virtualization, ASP or utility computing - has been around for over a decade now. Nevertheless, the industry is today ablaze with talks of this “old” technology.

More and more companies are showing interest in it due to the proliferation of devices in the Indian enterprises. Indian IT users are increasingly becoming sophisticated. The gap between the Western world and India is reducing, and similar solutions and technologies are being favoured in both the worlds.

If we were to compare the two prominent segments in India, namely large enterprises and SMBs, it will be worth noting that SMBs are definitely showing interest in endpoint virtualization. However, large enterprises are a step ahead of them and are already implementing it.

Symantec recently conducted a survey of IT administrators; it found that 36 per cent of the respondents have earmarked at least a quarter of their entire 2009 IT budget for endpoint virtualization initiatives.
 
CIOL: What are the factors that pushed endpoint virtualization among enterprises?

SG: Enterprises are now seeing more and more value in endpoint virtualization. There are a few factors, which have pushed the wide adoption of this technology.

They are:
Economic need – The technology’s ability to help organizations save real dollars and rationalize investment.

Supporting technologies – Technologies such as network reliability and bandwidth have reached  a level necessary to enable efficient application and OS streaming.

Recognition of application virtualization to create more securable data.

All of these have pushed endpoint virtualization towards the inevitable outcome that all successful technologies reach: becoming mainstream.