I Calvin Hsu, Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Citrix Presentation Server, and I just wrapped up a visit to the UK and Southern France talking to analysts and journalists about Citrix views of virtualisation (I sticking with the Euro-spelling in the spirit of things) all layers of IT: apps, desktops, servers, storage...

The people that helped arrange meetings told me that people were pretty keen to sign up to talk to Citrix about virtualisation and get our perspectives on it. Some of that I attribute to just wanting to latch onto anything related to the topic, knowing that their readership would eat it up. No surprise there since it such a hot topic and a buzzword these days.

But there also seemed to be a genuine desire to hunt down meaning amongst the technical bits. Sometimes we get so involved in explaining the technology and in defining the nuances of how things work, that we lose a sense for why we care. know that I personally as a product marketing guy have been guilty of that - it a rut that easy to get dragged into, especially in crowded or emerging markets. Having been in and around virtualisation technology companies nearly 8 years now, I heard (and created so many technology-driven definitions of what the various flavors of virtualisation entail that it maddening.

So part of the mission of my trip was to get back to basics. Let talk about virtualisation, sure, but let not go down the death-spiral before we get it clear that the main reason anyone is interested in it at all is primarily because it does one basic consolidate. Consolidate servers, consolidate disks, and in the case of CPS, consolidate applications. It does this by separating the physical from the logical - but at the end of the day, the reason we care is because we need to consolidate.

This approach seemed to resonate with the people I talked to, because it offered a way to link virtualisation with consolidation of applications - which in turn supports strategic business initiatives like securing intellectual property and confidential data, outsourcing, business continuity, remote working, pandemic preparation, etc. That led to discussions about customer deployments and business value, rather than focusing purely on the IT operational challenges of configuration and networking and bandwidth...