Thomas Bittman

At this week’s Gartner Symposium in Orlando, there was a noticeable shift in the end user discussions regarding virtualization and cloud computing, and a few surprises:
1) In my presentation on server virtualization on Monday, before I started, I asked the audience how many of them considered private cloud computing to be a core strategy [...]

[Read more →]

Tomorrow I leave for Orlando for our annual all-up IT conference of the year in Orlando, Florida. Attendees see this conference as a one-stop week-long update on all IT industry trends, an opportunity to network with thousands of their peers (including more than a thousand CIOs), and an opportunity to have face-to-face one-on-ones (as opposed [...]

[Read more →]

There’s a big change coming to the server virtualization market, and it has serious ramifications.
The midmarket is waking up. At Gartner, the number of midmarket clients who are just starting out with virtualization has been growing exponentially for the last year or so. We just completed a worldwide survey of nearly 1,500 companies with 100-999 [...]

[Read more →]

Few organizations that I talk to seem to understand the strategic ramifications of server virtualization. They tend to think about cost-cutting – virtualization simply as a form of efficient consolidation. We’ve surveyed our clients – those starting out on virtualization say they are doing it to save money. They are thinking tactically.
Hey, there’s nothing [...]

[Read more →]

At VMworld Europe 2009, Citrix made an important virtualization industry announcement – their XenServer package will carry no license price (just support). This package includes centralized management of distributed VMs, and live migration capability.
It isn’t everything you need to manage a virtual machine pool, but many smaller companies who might have avoided virtualization completely [...]

[Read more →]

We spend a lot of time at Gartner looking ahead. But it’s also fun to look at what might have been…

What if no one had developed an x86 hypervisor? How well would multi-core x86 processors be selling today?
What if Microsoft had acquired VMware in 2001? Would they have snuffed it out (until something [...]

[Read more →]

Cisco’s public blog recently announced an architectural approach they call “Unified Computing”. There’s been a lot of speculation about Cisco moving into the blade server business and so forth. I think Cisco just made clear that in their view the network may be at the center of IT, but “unifying” it with computing and storage [...]

[Read more →]

Why is virtualization important? Why is cloud computing compelling? Why is agility becoming so important in data centers?
It isn’t simply about saving money – although that does help create a business case. It’s about our inevitable cultural speed shift, and it’s driven by our kids.
When I was young, I wanted everything “now”. We all did. [...]

[Read more →]

What a crazy and exhilarating week in Las Vegas!
I delivered the keynote at Gartner’s 27th annual Data Center Conference this week. Here are four major points I made. Later I’ll post some key take-aways from hours and hours of conversations – lots of great insights from conversations between our analysts and more than 1,800 attendees [...]

[Read more →]

This week at Gartner’s Symposium in Orlando I will be presenting “Virtualization Changes Virtually Everything” and “The Future of Infrastructure and Operations: The Engine of Cloud Computing”. Ken Dulaney and I will also be leading a Masterminds discussion with Cisco’s CEO and Chairman, John Chambers. Here’s what you can expect:
On Monday, my “Virtualization” presentation focuses [...]

[Read more →]