Cisco Systems may be busy building and selling network gear, but it still takes a little time to do research, such as a recent report on cloud traffic becoming the dominant traffic force in just a few years time. Now the company is taking a cold hard look at virtualization, and here it finds that 77 percent of IT pros have some form of virtualization in their shops. Better news for the likes of VMware and Citrix is that 71 percent plan to increase their spend, some 20 percent on average.

Driving this demand is the fact that virtualization is working. Those that are exploiting virtualization are gaining a competitive advantage, or so 91 percent of those asked said.

By turning one computer into many, virtualization drives down costs and increases computing efficiency, not just easing management headaches but increasing green computing at the same time. In fact 95 percent of those asked by Cisco cited efficiency and cost savings, and for 61 percent, scalability improved as well.

For Virt, Bigger is Better

Virtualization can be complicated to implement, not the least of which are figuring out the licensing and backup issues. As might be expected, larger shops are more readily adopting this technology.

“Larger companies are making virtualization more of a priority, as 80 percent of firms with 100 to 500 employees have funds in their IT budget dedicated to virtualization compared to only 50 percent of firms with less than 100 employees that have funds dedicated to virtualization,” Cisco said.

So what is holding back adoption? “Of firms that don’t have virtualization in place, 61 percent of middle managers said cost stands as the biggest barrier,” the research found.

Cisco Research Tackles Cloud

If there is one company that gets the cloud, it is Cisco. But Cisco doesn’t have the kind of cloud services Google and Amazon do, so what does it know?

Plenty. After all, it is Cisco gear that powers the data centers that drive the cloud. And by looking at demands for its networking and server gear, the company can predict future traffic.

Cisco now says cloud traffic will more than quadruple by 2017, growing at a CAGR of 35 percent. And the cloud will come to utterly dominate data centers. Also by 2017 a full two thirds of data center traffic will be cloud traffic.

Next year is the tipping point when cloud traffic represents the majority of data center traffic.

This is actually great news. You see, the cloud is a far more efficient use of data center resources than traditional applications, as the cloud is highly virtualized, acts as a utility and exploits nearly every computing cycle the data center has to offer.

As energy costs soar and enterprises run out of capacity, data center efficiency becomes a crucial issue. The cloud is that data center efficiency.

There are economic implications for enterprises moving to this more efficient model, and at the same time global issues. More efficient use of energy have implications for global energy markets and pricing, global warming as well as impacting how long certain sources such as fossil fuels may last.