CIOL: How will virtualization help enterprises in cost optimization?

SG: The year 2008 brought with it a flurry of new enterprises dipping their toes into the endpoint virtualization pool. As a result, the cost of the technology has come down, and as the cost continues to lower, the door to even greater advancements in 2009 is opening up.

When it comes to endpoint virtualization, it doesn't matter whether enterprises adopt virtualization in their data centre or an end-user does so on the desktop. One of the key areas where we're focussing on is that we're trying to make the user experience easily portable, traceable, and manageable.

Given the economic climate, companies last year weren't too concerned about saving 10 per cent of their software-licensing budget. This year, however, they want to save any IT cost that they can.

One of the assets out of this is to manage software that people have already bought. If our software can help somebody save 20 per cent or even 50 per cent of their software budget, that immediately falls under cost-optimization.

Server vs. endpoint virtualization
Server virtualization introduces new requirements that affect key service level processes, such as back-up, disaster recovery, and storage management. Symantec infrastructure software is optimized to address these new requirements, and enables you to move the most mission-critical workloads, from test and development to production, with confidence.

At the endpoint, Symantec solutions enable you to transform the way applications are managed and delivered, reduce costs, and make cloud computing a reality for your organization.

Symantec supports all of the most popular virtualization platforms available today, so you can manage heterogeneous physical and virtual server and storage infrastructure with the same industry-leading software tools. Symantec's solutions for virtualization enable organizations to take full advantage of server and endpoint virtualization, while preserving best practices for efficiency and cost savings from their physical environment.