There are currently two prominent management cultures implemented within the IT organization: one where in the company’s in-house team is trained to manage physical hosting services infrastructure and another which is composed of highly trained IT professionals who focus on virtual machines.

It’s going to be difficult to find peace within the IT world so long as IT organizations perceive virtualization as a form of complex technology which requires special skills to efficiently manage. But as the economic issues continue to push the cost of IT upward, the pressure to rationalize data center management heightens. Where there were once two factions, in the end, only one will prevail.
The industry is already seeing the resurgence of individuals running physical infrastructure who currently have the law of economics favouring them. These are the people who are driving traditional systems management providers such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and CA in order to efficiently integrate their IT management platforms with virtual management solutions developed by Citrix, Microsoft and VMware as well as a number of third party providers. There are even incumbent systems management firms that are looking to provide virtual management start-ups in order to adopt new technologies at a comparatively cheaper cost as opposed to developing the same capabilities in-house.

The demand for management integration will logically create new opportunities for solution providers. But they also have to pay attention to where they are investing their capital in terms of training new people. It is only a matter of time before IT organizations figure out that it is less expensive to manage both virtual and physical servers through a single glass pane. There is also the cost-effectiveness of having a common management framework which eliminates licensing fees that will probably be considered later on.