Broader adoption

Although the virtualisation market continues to grow at an impressive rate, there is still great scope for broader deployment within existing clients and plenty of potential customers that have not adopted the technology at all. So what hurdles are holding back widespread adoption and how are they going to be overcome?

Technical Architecture Solutions' director, Tony Wilkinson, said larger companies needed to take the lead with a 'virtual first, physical second' approach. While he has seen some evidence of this during the past nine months, the next step would be for those same large organisations to address infrastructure scalability.

"A lot of the problems today are around governance - change management, automation, tracking how many virtual machines are out there so you don't have a licensing issue," he said. "That's an infrastructure project, which is quite often the budget that gets cut first."

Leading Solutions' national services manager, Roy Pater, said the biggest inhibitor to broader adoption was having enough qualified people trained to meet demand and the salary inflation this pressure created.

"There are too many guys running around with unreasonable salary expectations. Just because you have a VMware qualification doesn't mean you can expect to be paid $120,000 a year," he said. "We've all been through the tech wreck and, speaking to my peers in the industry, we're not prepared to pay those salaries. These guys need to be realistic."

But anybody who can't get the salary they want will end up working as a contractor, according to Artis Group's sales manager, Chris Caswell. The risk this creates for channel organisations, he said, is that they have to employ these people on a short-term basis to fulfill pieces of business but have no idea whether they are any good.

IMC Communications' technology services director, Andrew Gifford said every decent systems engineer was desperate to get into virtualisation and argued these projects were perfect for contractors.

"They've got a defined start and a neat finish when all the targets are virtualised. Once they get two or three under there belt, contractors can go in and tell the client to cut the vendor out," he said.

Pater suggested this was short-term thinking and such contractors would end up twiddling their thumbs when virtualisation gets further down the adoption cycle to the build out phase.

"They've got to learn that staying on an even keel gives you longevity," he said. "You can go working as a contractor but at least in our environment they can cross-skill when a technology becomes normalised."

Rather than employing 'chance contractors', Pater said Leading Solutions preferred to partner with smaller, specialist organisations such as Technical Architecture Solutions (TAS).

"As a large player we offer a vehicle for that because we have the sales force, we've got the critical mass and they have the expertise," he said.

TAS director, Tony Wilkinson, said it was also reluctant to use ad hoc contractors because of the damage it could do to the company's reputation as a specialist.