Widespread adoption of virtualization technology is still to be seen, especially in smaller organizations. The reasons for this are many; primarily a lack of understanding of business benefits. Enterprises have just recently woken up to the business benefits virtualization can provide. Until now it was merely seen as another technology that would make running the data center easier. 

It seems, SAP has realized the importance of aligning virtualization with the business process. In a bid to bring about continuous innovation in virtualization, SAP has formed the Enterprise Virtualization Community, along with tech vendors AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, HP, Intel Corporation, NetApp, Novell, Red Hat, Sun, and Vmware. The community will aim to develop new strategies for making business benefits of virtualization easily apparent.

It also aims to develop new strategies for business process-driven virtualization to help companies cut costs while increasing efficiencies.

Broadly, the main aim will be to align virtualization with the business objectives, to make virtualization financially appealing to the consumers. This would involve bringing down deployment costs and making integration easier.

How exactly this community will function and what will be the role of the individual vendors within it is still not very clear. We contacted a few of the member companies, however their replies had not been received at the time of publication of this article.