October 30, 2009

IT Buyers Prioritize Virtualization Over Cloud

Strategists Should Plan Practical Offerings And Messaging For Buyers

by Frank E. Gillett

with Ellen Daley, Chétina Muteba, Madiha Ashour

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

In the Forrester Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2009, we used carefully worded questions to test buyer priorities on initiatives for virtualization, consolidation, automation, internal cloud, and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). We learned that despite the similarities of the ideas under these phrases, most buyers are prioritizing initiatives for consolidation, virtualization, and automation — but few buyers, by comparison, are prioritizing "cloud" initiatives As a result, vendor strategists should use familiar concepts and terms to market cloud offerings. And rather than market general purpose IaaS offerings, service providers should build focused offerings such as archiving-, identity-, and email-as-a-service.

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