According to a Quest Software survey of more than 200 organizations at VMworld, more than half of the respondents indicated that at least 25 percent of their 2012 IT budgets will be allocated to virtualization projects across a broad range of critical initiatives, including backup and recovery, virtual desktops, network management, and performance and capacity management, highlighting a clear need for comprehensive virtualization management solutions.

Asked to identify the business requirements most likely to drive increased prioritization of virtualization initiatives in 2012, the need to improve business agility was cited by 61 percent of respondents.

Maximizing reduced budgets was cited by 56 percent of respondents, while meeting increasingly demanding user expectations and managing an increasingly mobile workforce were cited by 31 percent and 28 percent, respectively.

The Quest survey also indicated that a significant portion of IT budgets in 2012 will be allocated to virtualization-related initiatives, with more than half of respondents indicating that their organizations planned to allocate at least 25 percent of annual spending to virtualization projects.

In addition, 40 percent of respondents surveyed indicated that their organizations would spend up to 50 percent of their IT budgets on virtualization, and 10 percent of respondents indicated that more than half of their IT budgets would be allocated to such projects.

Respondents ranked backup and recovery as the aspect of virtualization management most important to their business, with more than 60 percent identifying it as their most critical virtualization initiative.

Virtualization monitoring continues to be a priority, as more than 70 percent of respondents indicate they either have a virtualization monitoring solution in place today or are in the process of evaluating one.

Organizations are also increasingly prioritizing their desktop virtualization and capacity management projects, with more than 50 percent of respondents stating they already have a solution in place or are in the process of evaluating one for each area.

Quest Software surveyed 235 attendees of the 2011 VMworld events in Las Vegas and Copenhagen, a cross-section of IT professionals that included both executive-level decision makers such as chief technology officers and chief information officers, as well as a broad range of end users including systems, network, database, storage and virtualization administrators.

Quest’s online survey asked respondents to provide insight into the status of their company’s virtualization deployments across backup and recovery, desktop virtualization, performance monitoring, and capacity management, as well as their company’s virtualization priorities for 2012. Companies ranging from less than 1,000 employees to more than 15,000 across all market segments participated in the survey.