Depending on who you speak to - engineer, IT, data center, or a user - the term “virtualization” means something completely different. While it is a chameleon concept, universally virtualization is about breaking the bond with physical reality, said Marie Hattar, VP of systems and security solutions at Cisco, as she began her presentation about the growing role and definition of virtualization in the enterprise.

Watch my one-on-one video interview with Marie Hattar of Cisco.

All levels of virtualization are relevant to us. It requires us to expand our view beyond “what’s under my roof is relevant.” Don’t just think about your in house applications and what’s going on in your data center. For example, many companies’ sales staff are using outside social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn as their customer relations management tool.

People are complex beings that have different aspects to their lives. Virtualization allows individuals to activate those multiple personalities while still physically being in the same location. For example, check on the kids at school via webcam, collaborate in real time with an office in Europe, and make reservations for dinner - all from one location. If you can do that, you can be far more efficient.

Virtualization requires you to think about the network first, not necessarily server and storage. Network brings transparency to the picture. It lets you monitor performance and benefits, and dynamically partition resources off so you can do jobs on the fly.

There are four business cases for virtualization:

• Provision in minutes
• Productivity and differentiation
• Environmental impact
• Business continuity

Hattar believes the virtualization holdback is due to the traditional silo’ed nature of organizations. For virtualization to work, the whole IT infrastructure needs to be on board. Virtualization is all about shared resources. Once the network grows, you see the network effect, thus the increased value of virtualization.

Most people think of virtualization as cloud computing because that’s the way it’s currently being productized. Cloud computing comes to us in three different forms:

• Flexible infrastructure
• Abstract services - Variety of capabilities
• Application services - SaaS

Virtualization still has a couple major issues. One is the lack of standards. If you want to move stuff from your data center to the cloud and back again, you can’t do that. People fear vendor lock in. This was the discussion at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. The other issue is weak security with virtualization. Because when you virtualize, you’re hiding things. Yet, as Hattar argued, as more companies use virtual environments it reduces data leakage.

Virtualization frees you up to spend more time on your business

As you virtualize more, your role is going to change. You’re going to focus more on strategy and less on infrastructure. You must develop a holistic plan as you virtualize. In a virtual environment you can manage without having a human present. To begin heading down the virtualization road, you need to move from a server-centric model to a services-centric model.

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Tags: cisco, cloud computing, Interop, interop_ny, marie hattar, virtualization

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