The onslaught of virtualisation seems to be gaining momentum with vendors offering virtualisation of servers, PCs, applications and also the systems management tools to manage virtual server farms in a virtual data centre underpinned by grid computing. So the question is how does this apply to BI? BI tools are just effectively applications after all running on application servers and now as we deploy BI services it is clear that these can be deployed on virtual servers in a virtual data centre which could combine in-house BI services and BI as a Service (BIaaS) offerings.

So expect to see the BI virtualisation begin to appear. Already we have seen BI vendors like SAS stepping into the market with a VMWare offering and Vertica coining the term 'cloud based' analytics. I think this is the beginning of the flood gates opening on BI virtualisation. The challenge for most of us is how to best configure our BI systems to exploit virtualisation and how to manage a virtual BI environment to optimise performance, availability, reliability and scalability. If you are doing anything in your shop in this area please let us know. There is much to learn in this rapidly advancing area