Codestone

Virtualisation is playing a key role in the changing landscape of the IT service sector.

This is according to president and chief executive officer of Citrix Mark Templeton, who was speaking at the Interop New York event last week, Channel Web reports.

He identified three key eras of enterprise technology, with the first being mainframe computing of the 1970s and 1980s and the second distributed computing, which occurred from around 1990 to 2002.

Presently, Mr Templeton said at the event, we are in the "on-demand services era", which has seen the power of computing shift to the end user.

He noted that virtualisation will enable enterprises to deliver all of their IT services on an on-demand basis "at every layer of the stack", adding that this is the "holy grail" of computing at this level.

Mr Templeton's comments came after John Bara of Citrix's datacentre and cloud division said that ensuring cost efficiency will soon become one of the main factors of virtualisation platforms.