Middle East enterprises will adopt virtualization, a methodology of dividing the resources of a computer, in 2010, said an expert.

The IT trend is fast shaping up to be a major influencer in the end to end infrastructure - including server, storage, network, application and desktop - for regional companies, said Sandeep Saxena, vice president, Raqmiyat, a leading UAE-based systems integrator.

Virtualization is expected to be a major driver of the UAE’s increasing IT spend, which is forecasted to hit $4.79 billion (12.4 per cent more than 2009), he added.

“Companies in the region today are developing strong appreciation for ‘virtualization’, given the host of excellent advantages it offers, from saving space to cutting back power costs to maximised hardware efficiency,” said Saxena.

“It is not surprising that many enterprises in leading regional markets such as the UAE are starting to adopt it, which will definitely affect the overall IT spend this year.”

“Virtualization is a foundation stone towards cloud computing and an ideal setup for the test environment and disaster recovery infrastructure,” Saxena continued.

“The increased demand for this implementation opens up excellent opportunities for us to partner with leading companies across various sectors to develop personalised virtualization solutions that will address each organisation’s specific requirements,” he added.

Leveraging its expertise in delivering value to the SME and enterprise computing environments, Raqmiyat has geared up to offer comprehensive and customised virtualization solutions to regional enterprises.

The areas in the adoption of virtualization today are not limited to only server virtualization whose benefits include consolidation, increased utilization, reduced operating expenditure with limited impact on user operations; and desktop virtualization, which allows users to centrally manage desktop infrastructure and meet compliance and security requirements, he said.

New upcoming areas like storage virtualization and network interface virtualization help faster turnaround times, quicker information recovery and lower IT operational cost, are among the other areas of virtualization, he added.

Leveraging its Gold and Enterprise partnerships with key virtualization vendors including HP, Microsoft and VMware, Raqmiyat is meeting the growing demand among companies in the banking and finance, and private and corporate sectors, as well as government agencies for virtualization implementations, a statement said. – TradeArabia News Service