4 Steps To Becoming A Trusted Virtualization Advisor

By The Business Solutions Network

This $9 million MSP’s projected 17% revenue growth is coming from its foray into selling virtualization solutions and services to the SMB market.

lthough virtualization may not get as much press as the cloud when it comes to talking about “IT opportunities for the channel,” the fact is that virtualization solutions and services are in high demand. Consider this: The procurement and deployment of virtualized servers has more than doubled in the last three years. VMware’s research revealed that the percent of virtualized servers vs. physical servers grew from 29 percent in 2009 to 66 percent in 2012, and it continues to grow at nearly twice the rate of historical physical server procurements and deployments. The study goes on to say that the top five drivers for this shift from physical to virtual servers include reduced hardware costs, server provisioning time reduction, disaster recovery improvements, reduced maintenance/ upgrade expenses, and shorter application rollouts.

Unlike the early days of virtualization, where the benefits were reserved for large enterprises that had dozens of servers residing in large data centers, virtualization is now a viable option for SMBs. E-Safe Technologies (E-Safe) is an example of an MSP (managed services provider)/ IT solutions provider that not only recognized this trend a couple of years ago, but acted on that knowledge by implementing a four-step strategic process to market, sell, and support virtualized solutions and IT services to SMBs.