Ziya Aral, chairman and CTO, DataCore Software
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| IT should be a business enabler and not an inhibitor to corporate streamlining and growth. | ||
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Q: What is the biggest myth about virtualization and why?
The biggest myth about virtualization is that it has anything to do with hardware whatsoever. 90 percent of the virtualization solutions out there are packaged with hardware and the only objective of virtualization is to free the link between environment and hardware itself. The net-net is that the mythology of buying a virtualization "box", an appliance or a virtualization environment that includes mostly hardware is just totally insane. It is complete mythology made up by the vendors. The whole idea behind virtualization is to free your self from the infrastructure.
The biggest challenge facing IT departments is...
...how to continue to support more and more discrete systems--whether they are physical or virtual--with fewer and fewer people. This typically means that issues such as transportability, configurability, compatibility should all be very, very important characteristics of systems that IT departments deploy. As the number of people vis-à-vis the number of systems continues to decrease, then anything that is specialized, out-of-the-ordinary or "funky"--any boxes that people need to understand, any configurations that IT people need to understand become a bigger and bigger drag. The number of people manning these discrete systems is that much smaller.
Do you expect it to be business as usual, in light of the recession?
No, not at all. The single largest productivity increment in all industries--particularly if you get out of manufacturing and into service and even more so retail--is computerization. But it has been that way for a while. Computerization, automation, networking, all of these things have become significant costs in their own right for a very long time.
In a recession, you have two problems--one is that your business contracts. But the other thing is that you have to be prepared to deal with what happens when it stops contracting--because the whole world is reinvented in those moments.
You therefore have to worry about what recovery looks like. A recession significantly aggravates a problem, which under ordinary times can probably be deferred or ignored for some period of time.
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