VMware's Raghu Raghuram, vice president of datacentre and desktop platforms, recently sat down and spoke with TechWorld to find out how he sees the year ahead.

Q: Where will we see product strategy heading in the next 12 months? A: You’ve seen some signs with the ESX 3.5 product line. It’s now an industry standard. We want to be sure that all workloads can work on it, also that being virtual is better than being physical because it's a better environment for systems management, and for keeping systems up and running.

Q: What new products will we see over the next 12 months? A: What we are introducing today is what gets deployed over the next 12-18 months, such as 10 gig networking, AMD’s virtualisation indexing, IO virtualisation built into cards, MPIV on storage cards, up to 32 cores. Other things that will happen in the ecosystem - we see a great wave of IO virtualisation, increasing cores, and from our own product line - I can’t talk about specifics but you’ll see us being concurrent with these technologies as they come out.

Q: What are customers telling you they want? A: We measure the rates of adoption in production. Last year it was 85 percent now it’s over 90 percent. We also ask to what extent people put applications into virtual machines, and that number stays steady in the mid-40s. The difference is that our customer base has doubled. We also ask what applications are going into VMs. Over 60 percent said enterprise applications such as ERP, SalesForce, and databases. High end applications such as transactional applications are not yet virtualised, especially since some are not on x86.

Because of today’s increased hardware performance, customers are not noticing any slight decrease in performance due to virtualisation. Also, people are saying that the flexibility they get far outweighs the virtualisation performance overhead. Also VMotion is being used by about 60 percent, HA and DRS by 42 percent, so it’s about more than just consolidation but it's gathering mainstream adoption. In the UK, the numbers are close to those of the US.

Read the entire interview from TechWorld, here.