Virtualization could save businesses $6b in costs by 2020: IDC

If Australian companies were to virtualize their severs and physical infrastructure, $6 billion in costs could be saved from now to 2020, according to a new whitepaper by research firm IDC.

In the VMware sponsored whitepaper, Vision 2020: Virtualization’s Potential US$98 Billion Impact, IDC forecasts virtualization to save $2.99 billion in server spending, $2.15 billion in server admin costs, $0.84 billion in power and cooling and $0.04 billion in floor space by 2020.

Over the period 2003 to 2020, IDC predicts cost savings of $9.7 billion in Australia and $106 billion across the Asia Pacific region.

In addition, 6.4 million tonnes of CO2 could be avoided from 2003 to 2020 as a result of virtualization, according to IDC.

The Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) also released a study that forecasts if most of the world’s enterprises were to take up cloud computing for their large-scale IT operations, it could abate about 9.1 gigatonnes of CO2 and save US$1.9 trillion in gross energy and fuel costs by 2020 — about 16 per cent of the total Eurozone debt today.
IDC also said there can be significant time savings for businesses that are trying to speed up their time to market with services.

“There are still a lot of people where it takes six months to deploy a service in a physical world and [with virtualization] some people can get that down to days.

“What this paradigm virtualisation enables you to do is to disaggregate that paradigm of one application, one operating system and one server instead of several,” said IDC analyst Matt Oostveen.

“If you’re the CMO and you go running into the CIO’s office and say ‘we need to deploy something very quickly’ if you have this old paradigm of [computing] you are not able to respond quick enough. That’s a big issue because the ROI expectations placed upon a CMO are really short, they are often less than six months.

“So you need to change your underlying systems. Get rid of that rigidity and increase velocity; that speed to market.”

Simplifying management and maintenance of servers and physical infrastructure is the second top reason CIOs and managers choose to go down the virtualization path, followed by reducing costs, according to IDC.