Close to 71 percent of U.S. retailers are turning to a broad set of virtualization solutions as way to save money, maximize space and gain better control of their IT infrastructures according to Microsoft’s “Virtualization in Retail Survey 2008″.

Conducted between February and March 2008, the survey includes responses from 205 IT management technology decision-makers. “For a chain of 1,000 stores or more, adding just one more server or application per store is a significant investment. That is why virtualization is an attractive alternative, as more than 50 percent of retailers surveyed had between three and ten servers in each of their stores already,” said Geoff Thomas, General Manager of Microsoft’s U.S. Retail and Hospitality Group.

Key findings include the following:

• Seventy-one percent are using virtualization to isolate applications, data, operating system instances or transaction services in their stores or headquarters.
• Thirty-five percent cited using virtualization technology to make it easier to centralize deployment and ongoing management of applications.
• Thirty-one percent pointed to energy savings as driving their purchases of virtualization technology.
• Thirty-eight percent cited the need to provide centralized security as a driver toward implementing virtualization within its stores or remote locations.

To read the full article visit the Microsoft web site.

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