iReach, Ireland's leading Research and Marketing Intelligence company which specializes in technology and telecommunications, forecasts significant improvements in virtualization technology over the next two years because of developments in resource management and distributed-resources as well as the growing prominence of workload management and distributed-workload management solutions within enterprises.

IReach research revealed that a quarter of European firms are currently using server virtualization and that 67% of users plan to increase their usage over the next year.

iReach believes that organizations should consider the following when launching server virtualization:

1. Plan for a staggered approach and prepare for any future steps relating to storage virtualisation, automated configuration management and virtualised network resources.
2. Initiate planning towards automated configuration and data centre automation which will lay the foundaton for future flexibility.
3. Develop a migration road map for the IT organisation that matches the technology migration planning.

Click here to read the entire research paper and related conclusions authored by Ed O'Malley, iReach Analyst.