The study, which surveyed 300 CIOs and other top IT executives at companies in the U.S., EMEA and APAC with more than $250 million in annual revenue, revealed that servers, storage and applications are the most important areas to virtualize. Respondents report the most success in virtualizing servers.

Fifty six percent of respondents are using multiple platforms/vendors for server virtualization management, while 35% are standardized on one platform. Sixty eight percent of the respondents rate the importance of centralizing the management of multi-platform virtualized or physical environments as critical or very important.

"Successful management of the virtualization infrastructure is essential in order to optimize technology initiatives, enable documented returns on investments and enhance productivity across the enterprise," said Paula Daley, vice president of product marketing at CA. "IT executives must go beyond relying on an assortment of point platform-based management tools to one that centralizes virtual, physical and clustered environments. Doing so will increase their confidence in managing virtual server environments, reduce complexity, improve operational efficiency, and ensure that IT investments are optimized and generating competitive advantages for the business."

The study found that the most important capabilities when managing a server virtualization environment are performance/utilization, security and automation. It also revealed the top benefits experienced as a result of server virtualization initiatives are easier hardware provisioning and software deployment, more flexible development and testing environments, and optimizing system performance.

Respondents rated security as the most significant challenge when managing server virtualization initiatives. Measuring return on investment is also a critical management challenge. Just 28% of respondents worldwide have a method in place to measure the ROI on virtualization solutions, yet 51% indicate they are extremely confident or confident that their companies are maximizing the return on virtualization investments.
Over the next 18 months, the percent of respondents in each region using virtualization in production to support non-mission critical and mission-critical applications, as well as the percent using virtualization to support business continuity/disaster recovery is expected to increase. The top five mission-critical business services to be used in virtual environments are IT infrastructure, customer service, accounting/finance, data analytics, and application development.