VMware has introduced three VMware Infrastructure product packages tailored for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), a segment the company says makes up 60% to 70% of its customers.
The new offerings were designed to enable IT administrators and decision-makers at SMEs to easily deploy virtual infrastructure and quickly reap its transformative benefits, it says.
"Virtualisation is enabling companies of all sizes to reduce the cost and complexity of IT," says Ben Matheson, SME director at VMware.
Through this technology, he says, SMEs can optimise their existing IT investments while providing benefits of virtualisation such as disaster recovery, high availability, simplified IT management and reduced energy costs.
Deploying virtualisation can improve service levels, and enable customers to spend less on IT and reinvest these savings in their businesses, he adds.
Industry analyst firm The Yankee Group says virtualisation deployments among SMEs are expected to double during the next two years. It defines SMEs as companies with less than 100 servers, or under 1 000 employees.
"Virtualisation has become a mainstream technology force, influencing IT architecture decisions for companies of all sizes," said Gary Chen, senior analyst at The Yankee Group.
"For SMEs, this means evaluating the A-to-Z benefits of virtualisation such as server consolidation, business continuity and disaster recovery for use on current IT assets while planning for future growth. We see virtualisation adoption as a trend in the SME space that will continue to aggressively grow over time," notes Chen.
Matheson says the SME bundles are based on the latest release of VMware Infrastructure, the third-generation software suite. "New products include VMware ESX Server 3i, VMware Guided Consolidation and VMware Update Manager."
The bundles are expected to be available later this year.
Related stories:
Companies look to virtualisation
BT targets SMEs
Share