2013 is pegged as a year that cloud computing will evolve to become the software-defined data centre.
So says Chris Norton, regional director for southern Africa at VMware, who points out that, when it comes to the local virtualisation market, the hypervisor market that underpins virtualisation is already mature.
"What will mature in 2013 is organisations will quickly progress along the journey to the software-defined data centre," he says.
According to Norton, the market has also been relatively depressed on the back of economic concerns, especially in the third quarter of 2012.
"Organisations are looking closely at solutions that can help drive significant returns of working capital," Norton says.
"Private cloud implementations are now the norm, with organisations extending the capabilities of their existing hypervisors with automation technologies and other aggregation toolsets as they progress on the journey and realise extensive benefits for doing so."
He also states that management and security is becoming more important to CIOs, as more tier one applications are deployed on hypervisors.
Describing the challenges local organisations face regarding virtualisation, Norton says: "Global adoption has exceeded 50% of all workloads virtualised; however, although SA is quick to adopt new technologies, it seems the pockets of innovators do not accurately represent the region as there are still a lot of data centres out there that are museums for IT decisions of the past.
"Sometimes a perception exists that companies can get more value from sweating existing assets than they can from deploying more efficient and cost-effective technologies - we seem to stick to the 'if it isn't broken, don't try to fix it' mentality and this exposes organisations as operational expenses skyrocket."
He also points out that the cost of bandwidth is inhibiting the broad base adoption of cloud computing, causing companies to hold back on cloud, which in turn is costing companies billions of rands in inefficiencies.
Norton believes virtualisation has been one of the most positively disruptive technologies of the last decade.
"It allows businesses to get significantly more return on infrastructure and reduce operational expenditure in the process," he says.
"When combined with additional technologies, such as management and automation toolsets, as well as other data centre enhancing technologies that are designed to help IT deliver on its mandate from business, a synergistic relationship can exist between the demands of the business on IT and IT's ability to be very scalable and flexible when it comes to servicing the business.
"This synergy could mean significant bottom-line profits for any organisation, regardless of size."
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