“Everyone is virtualizing the wrong thing!”

Last week I received a call form an IT executive in the financial space, franticly telling me of his 3am epiphany the night before, waking mid-sleep thinking to himself, “Everyone is virtualizing the wrong thing!”

He was adamant that we get together.

“Physical & OS Virtualization still do not give me control over my applications,” he realized, “What I really want is to create separation so I can run a low cost standardized infrastructure and run my applications in an on-demand fashion without thinking about the infrastructure, VM applications are just too bound to virtual infrastructure with all of the configuration management burdens of physical application installations. Application virtualization really seems like what has been the missing link preventing all of us from achieving a true on-demand enterprise for all of our applications.”

In all fairness, I should also note that he does believe that the physical and OS Virtualization train has left the station and isn’t going to derail anytime soon. In its wake, however, it has left an interesting issue, a lack of freedom from its virtual infrastructure, as he mentioned. This is where Application Capsules inside VM’s just make sense, as application virtualization can deliver independence to their customers across VM types, and cut down the pain created by the VM sprawl.

Our conversation reinforces that virtualizing the hardware and OS only creates one big management mess, or as my IT friend put it “Physical and OS virtualization just shift the mess, they don’t systematically solve anything.” Just look at some of the latest news in the virtualization space – aside from VMware launching the largest tech IPO since Google, Citrix acquired XenSource for $500 million, creating some great industry excitement. The Citrix news, specifically, shows how vendors are trying to address customers’ hunger to optimize their world, drive costs down and increase SLA delivery.

The first wave of virtualization has succeeded in maximizing the value of hardware investments however the most significant business value, which is largely untapped, comes from raising virtualization to the application level. Get ready for the next high tide.