A new report ‘Achieving IT Flexibility’ just published by Butler Group, identifies Server Virtualisation and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as two of the key technologies for organisations seeking to create a more flexible IT environment. However, whilst interest in both technologies is very high, the implementation experience is very different. 

 As part of the research for the report, Butler Group’s detailed IT flexibility study of 80 organisations showed that 69% of respondents had already deployed or trialled a Server Virtualisation solution. By contrast, although 60% of organisations were evaluating or adopting a SOA strategy, only 8% had deployed live services.  Tim Jennings, research director with Butler Group, and lead author of the report commented: “The outcomes of hardware flexibility are primarily cost savings and efficiency, whereas software flexibility is the main instigator of new business value. Organisations must focus on their SOA efforts if they are to benefit from greater flexibility”.