Ask Steve: SMBs

I recently spoke at a Hewlett-Packard roadshow with prospective customers in Florida. SMB and mid-market enterprise decision-makers filled the audience. The questions were incredible: mobility, networking, security, remote connectivity, video communications and compliance, just to name a few topics. Folks often ask me why my Ask Steve column covers so many types of technology. Doesn’t surprise me one lick: SMBs and the ecosystem serving them want to understand their options and purchase wisely.

This week Ask Steve tackles one very relevant question from a technologist in the Tampa crowd.

Joe from Tampa, FL: What is happening with virtualization and SMBs?

A: The power of virtualization has reached SMB markets, although not as deeply as enterprise markets. According to Yankee Group 2008 SMB survey data, 26% of medium businesses (100-499 employees) are using server virtualization in production servers.  By comparison 43% of enterprises (500+ employees) are using server virtualization today. Within 24 months, 69% of medium businesses expect to use server virtualization, quite a 2-year growth rate. Just for the record, 23% of small businesses (20-99 employees) and 8% of very small businesses (2-19 employees) use server virtualization in production servers.

Why do SMBs adopt server virtualization? See Exhibit 1. Like their larger enterprise brethren, SMBs adopt virtualization to reduce or contain costs associated with the number of servers they own. However, a secondary reason is that SMBs want to provide disaster recovery and failover solutions: both of which are more easily and cheaply implemented inside virtualized server environments.

Exhibit 1: SMB Adoption Drivers for Virtualization
Source: Yankee Group Anywhere Enterprise—Small and Medium:
2008 US IT Infrastructure Survey