Virtualization is being used today by many IT organizations seeking to reduce their costs and improve overall agility. There are different types of virtualization available, the most familiar being the practice of simulating the behavior of a physical IT asset in a software emulator and hosting that emulator in a virtual environment. This type of hardware virtualization can help companies better manage their physical resources, improve their utilization, and increase business agility by removing physical constraints regarding resource access, capacity, and data volatility.

Realizing Virtualization’s Full Potential
Most large organizations are in the process of adopting hardware virtualization approaches during the development of their enterprise applications. Most often, the key driver is to improve utilization of physical server capacity. However, hardware virtualization is not appropriate or feasible in all circumstances.

What if we could also apply the benefits of virtualization to other areas where enterprises may spend 60 percent or more of an enterprise IT budget, such as the extensive development and delivery costs of these applications? Many remaining critical challenges can be resolved with the complementary use of Service Virtualization, which leads to substantial additional benefits and improved ROI.

Service virtualization (SV) involves the simulation of software service behavior and the modeling of a virtual service to stand in for the actual service during development and testing. Service virtualization is complementary to hardware virtualization, and provides a solution to address each of the aforementioned hardware virtualization limitations such as:

* Providing 24/7 access to the service to support more concurrent development efforts