One of the key areas that stands to benefit from wide adoption of virtualization is the retail store front.   It’s an expensive road to get there, but would be a long-term benefit to retail.

Virtual legos, by fdecomite

Why is it expensive?  For one, you have the problem of scale.  It’s difficult to stomach an investment that requires touching all of your stores.  The long term benefits can be substantial depending on how you approach it.

If you touch all of your stores ONCE with an upgraded, beefy machine that can run a hypervisor, you can continue to stand up and offer new services for quite some time without physically touching your stores.  This can be a huge benefit for companies looking to roll out new services in their stores, as well as more efficiently manage their current setup.

It’s an investment opportunity for retailers to take on, but it will give long term payback from an IT management perspective.  On paper, it seems like a slam dunk (again, understanding the initial capital outlay which may be hard to come by right now), but reality shows that not many retailers embrace this technology in their stores yet.

If you are one of those companies, what prevents you from virtualizing your stores or satellite locations today?

This post originally appeared on BrandenWilliams.com.

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