Despite the economy and the related lower-expected IT spending, businesses are interested in investing in virtualization, many smaller firms are attracted to cloud computing and both are on a path, in the long term anyway, to actual adoption of these technologies. At least that’s the message of a new study of 388 IT workers surveyed by IBM Corp.’s (IBM) main user group.
Right now, however, just 2 percent of the users surveyed are significant users of cloud computing and just 5 percent use cloud computing resources at all.
IBM has been heavily pushing cloud computing and virtualization. The company last year introduced its cloud services.
And just last week IBM posted strong financial results both for 2008 as a whole and the fourth quarter, and is actually bullish about the year ahead, in which it expects at least $9.20 per share in profit. The company’s chairman and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano said IBM anticipates 2010 profit to reach $10 to $11 per share. The company attributes its success despite this economic slump to its strategy of focusing more on high-margin customers and sales as part of a push to sell more high-value software and services.
