Virtualisation

"The changes in the way in which we live and interact with others is a constant fascination to me. I have been in the technology industry for 25 years and have seen trends come and go. But only in the last decade can I honestly say that I now see how close home and business life has become, how intertwined and inseparable our days are, and how the expectation of ‘on demand’ availability – even as a person, is expected."

"The aggressive growth in mobility solutions and flexible working has meant that productivity and efficiency is harnessed, without physical constraint. Running a business such as Maxima is a perfect testament to this. We have 11 support service centres across the UK, Ireland and India and 450 staff who are able to scale across our 1400 customers requirements and expectations. This is only possible due to the fact that our people are highly flexible, can operate offsite or onsite and our service centres offer are truly 24x7, 365 service commitment.

As businesses grow and change, the demands on employees are one thing. But just as people can be ‘virtually’ effective, so can IT infrastructure. Maxima is seeing a massive resurgence in businesses looking for optimal standards in computing. The move away from decentralisation to central control, means that the ability to control standards and performance of technology is far better. Our customers are asking for more resilience and efficiency of their IT environment, whilst at the same time are far more aware of the importance of paying attention to what it means to effect a Green IT policy. All of these requirements lay the perfect foundation for a virtualisation strategy. Being in control of the physical environment and deriving immediate cost reduction through consolidation, are obvious benefits we see being realised all the time with our customers.

We believe businesses can really thrive by embracing the virtual tools and technology to make them more agile. To this end, we remain committed to our service offering in this area and boast a full capability in the leading edge virtualisation technologies – VMware, Citrix and Microsoft Hyper-V. With the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, we are expecting the proliferation of virtualisation to accelerate. Microsoft, being a late entrant to the market, have compensated hugely by offering Hyper-V embedded into the server licence. A customer automatically has the option to ‘switch on’ the functionality and when combined with Windows 7 Desktop, the full value of a virtualised environment is possible, at a very aggressive price point. October 2009 marks the latest release of Hyper-V and combined with the licence bundling strategy. Our bets are on Microsoft to take virtualisation to an industry standard.

Maxima, is well equipped to move with customers in this direction. We have the depth of knowledge across the key technologies to be the go to player for virtualisation. So when you think virtualisation, think Maxima"