What's holding virtualization back?

Virtualization is one of those technologies that gets a lot of media attention, yet the uptake in the financial services industry seems to be lagging the hype somewhat. Waters brought together several industry big wigs to talk about this. The thing that struck me is that the main impediments seem to be political. People seem resistant because of the notion that services and raw computing power will somehow be rationed. This strikes fear in the hearts of business unit owners. One exec put it this way: "The biggest issue...in the capital markets in particular is internal politics. The technology allows sharing, policy-based management, prioritization, and SLA fulfillment, but you still have people putting their arms around their own silos." One lesson here is that you need to get the system working right off the bat, especially when it comes to trading and market data, and other latency sensitive applications. Your internal support will evaporate if the system is seen as a poor, money-saving hack delivered in a budget-constrained environment.  

For more:
- here's the article from Waters Online

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