Virtualisation is a raging tide that looks set to make the fortune of a number of IT vendors. Potential customers flock to seminars on virtualisation where they would previously have stayed in the office. And data centre managers rub their hands at the prospect of solving their space, computing power systems management and cooling issues at one fell swoop.

But the wave of virtualisation could adversely affect the futures of many vendors. How so?

One of the biggest drivers behind virtualisation is its ability, in the words of Richard Warley of the hosting company Savvis, "to arbitrage your processing cycles". In other words, you can make better use of existing servers by increasing processor utilisation through consolidation. It means running processes or applications on a single server in complete isolation from other applications. In theory, the result is that you need fewer servers, lowering your IT management overheads. And the technology that enables this is virtualisation.

This is no free ride of course. You need to be able to manage the virtual machines (VMs), and move them across hardware barriers in order to make best use of the technology -- preferably automatically. And you need to be able to ensure that the system or systems in which they're installed are running at maximum efficiency and are highly reliable -- one box could be supporting a lot more users after all.

The upshot is, though, that enterprises could end up buying many fewer discrete systems, and that could be a problem for many vendors. If your company is running its business on that vendor's products, you might care about this. Will it survive?