Is virtualization becoming mainstream?

But, Gillett said that there are many similarities between SMB and enterprise customers that would make virtualization more of a mainstream fit.

From his research SMBs have the same motivation as enterprise customers. For example, 49 per cent of SMBs and enterprise customers believe it is very important to improve disaster recovery through virtualization.

About 36 per cent of SMBs said it is very important to improve server manageability and flexibility and 41 per cent of the enterprise agree.

Improving power savings was virtually the same between SMBs (23 per cent) and enterprise (21 per cent) customers.

There wasn't much separation with cutting hardware costs between SMBs and enterprise customers polled. More than 38 per cent of SMBs marked it as very important, while 43 per cent of enterprise IT managers thought it was as important.

The same kind of applications such as databases and CRM run through SMBs as enterprise, Gillett continued.

About 26 per cent of SMBs believe they can consolidation email, while 28 per cent of those who run enterprise IT environments say email can be virtualized.

"Do not sell this on cost savings alone, but on a better way to look a creating and sharing IT infrastructure and virtualization is the catalyst for this," Gillett said.