Uncovering the ROI of virtualisation

Some customers who implement virtualisation solutions are not realising the ROI that they originally anticipated, and in many ways they are finding management of their virtualised environment more complex than they originally envisioned.  

So as a business, you have implemented a virtualisation project, but you still have high operational costs and a depreciating technology that runs in five year cycles that cost a bomb in the first place. “Huh! That can’t be right”, says the CTO, “I thought my operating budget would be a much smaller number this year, what’s going on?”

What costs were not realised up front? What service levels were not put in place and measured? How can businesses be ‘doing more with less’, but with the same number of resources? All very valid questions. However, there are a number of answers to this ROI puzzle.

Back when virtualisation landed on the doorstep, many organisations saw the immediate benefit of running multiple systems on one piece of hardware, recalling the mainframe days but at a fraction of the cost.  

Virtualisation seemed like it would make everyone’s lives easier and less complicated to manage.  

A variety of applications such as FTP, IIS, Active Directory, and many others fell in the category of “low hanging fruit” for virtualisation candidates. 

Organisations looked at specific applications and thought they would be a breeze to virtualise. Virtualising these applications was so easy and successful that the virtualisation hype quickly grew.