Strategy: So you've virtualized (sort of), what next?

I've blogged about it here:

But many of you may also fall prey to the "glory of virtualization" and ready to push you data center into the virtual world, in the hope of pleasing your CxO. You may not achieve a completely virtualized data center in the beginning. IT managers and Infrastructure managers are not ready to put their "mission-critical" applications such as e-mail, databases, crm, company portal etc on a virtualized platform. Obviously we always had an answer to that: high level load-balancing and clustering. But the IT managers who are not well averse with the developments in the industry can be blinded by such "hype" and are prone to succumbing to their "bounded awareness" by taking their applications/OSs into the virtual world and forgetting about crucial issues like hypervisor security, server sprawl, ILM (VMLM), existing siloed (siloed does not necessarily have to be a derogatory connotation, it does however impact the agility of your business, given the human intervention, that slows down the whole machinery) business process management approach (ITIL, CMDB, SLA, etc) that will undergo a heavy change as we move towards, or should I say, start-ups move towards grabbing that opportunity to push autonomous, self-healing, self-processing architecture.

These are big issues. I have spoken to some big companies, some even boasting to hold "top accounts" and when I mentioned that "it is very crucial to talk about the issues such as security etc", and I get to hear: "Hey, we have to sell the product, not tell them how it is". What "top account" firms do forget is that customers are talking and reading about it all the time, so if you come in to sell, they might already know the weaknesses of your product against some other competitor, who spent all this time waking you up!. That is why the battle is getting worse all the time. The ones who are choosing to ignore the customers problems, are losing business. I'll rephrase this: If you are not talking to your customer, he'll find someone else to talk to!

Read the rest at ITtoolbox.