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Endpoint V: 'Old' technology takes off!

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Deepa
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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.

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publive-imageShantanu 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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

 

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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.

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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.

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