Embracing Flexibility for Good

April 21st 2013

Leslie Faughnan reports in the Sunday Business Post.

IT Force are specialists in ICT contracting and projects, including virtualisation. 'The real wave of virtualisation in medium-sized enterprises in Ireland is only now under way,' said Joe Molloy, director of managed services. 'Most of them have certainly been looking at virtualisation, some have invested in server consolidation, but the real movement is in the last couple of years.

'That said, we certainly have clients now who are ambitious to secure a fully virtualised ICT set-up and who understand the business benefits. Some of them are quite literally starting from scratch but they tend to have a clear idea of where they need to get to.'

Molloy said that the late start in virtualisation, at least from an ICT industry point of view, is not necessarily because managers were doubtful about the technology. 'Very tight budgets were and possibly still are the biggest obstacle, so they didn’t fix what was not broken. Another factor is that quite a few had invested in ICT when times were good, so their hardware and systems were not out of date in any serious way.'

'Many SMEs depend on specialist applications that were not readily amendable to virtualisation until quite recently, Molloy said, for example CAD systems in architectural and engineering practices. ,t’s fair to say that the principal driver for virtualisation today is its potential contribution to improved company performance, doing things smarter and better, rather than the purely economic business case. Another factor, which strictly speaking is secondary, is business continuity. SMEs have become acutely conscious of how much they depend on their systems to survive. They understand the ease and reliability that virtualised systems bring to that. In the same vein they tend to recognise that once they are virtualised, changes and improvements can be made readily and quickly. Having survived hard times, doing more with less continues to be their mantra for the future.'