Channel Tech Center

Over the past several years two distinct management cultures have grown up inside the IT organization. The first is the traditional IT organization’s team of people dedicated to the managing on the physical infrastructure. The second group is a raft of highly trained IT professionals focused on virtual machines.

As long as IT organizations view virtualization as a complex technology that required special skills to manage, these two groups could live in relative peace. But as economic pressure continues to mount of the cost of IT, so too does the pressure to rationalize management in the data center. What that means is where there were once two groups there ultimately can only be one.

Already, we’re seeing the resurgence of the people who run the physical infrastructure, who ultimately have the laws of economics on their side. To that end, they have been driving traditional systems management vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and CA to better integrate their IT management platforms with the virtual machine management software not only provided by VMware, Citrix and Microsoft , but a host of third party companies as well. In fact, we’re already seeing the incumbent systems management players circling virtual management startups in the hopes of picking of some new technologies at a cost that is comparatively cheap when compared to developing the same capability themselves.

All this hue and cry for management integration naturally creates some major opportunities for solution providers in the channel. But solution providers should also pay attention to where they place their bets in terms of training. In the not too distant future, IT organizations may figure out that not only is having a single pane of glass to manage both physical and virtual servers a whole lot less expensive, it’s ultimately a lot less expensive when you start eliminating licensing fees because you only need one common management framework.

Of course, the virtual machine vendors today can still argue that the complexity and volatility of virtualization will require dedicated professionals and highly tailored management software. But that won’t always be the case forever.