Don't agree about virtualization (or most core infrastructure lanes for that matter) having long term growth potential. As IT becomes commoditized, and more people move the cloud, the on premise delivery of IaaS and PaaS are going to be less and less... unless you are working for Microsoft Azure, RackSpace, or AWS you're really not going to need to do Virtualization. It's going to be completely commoditized.
Virtualization is no different than Directory Services, Email, Collaboration or IM.... all areas of IT that are offered through the cloud today.
Think those ExchangE admins are a little shook of Office365? If they aren't, they are idiots. That's the other problem.... thinking long term. It's easy to think about the immediate, but what about 5-10 years from now? Where do you plan to be then once everything is in the cloud? Gotta stop thinking myopically.
IMHO where the real dough is going to be, is the SaaS part. Folks should be focusing on Ozone Widget Framework, or other AppDev areas - Sharepoint is another one. Coding will always have long life.
Of course I am talking a long time out - could be 5-10 years who knows. But all of these disciplines will be on the decline as more business move to the cloud regardless.
I work for a company that does Iaas and is similar to Rackspace. For future growth, well...eventually everyone who can afford to be in the cloud...will be in the cloud...
But that is a LONG way out...virtualization and storage are going to be THE hot markets for at least the next 5 - 7 years, if for no other reason that it allows some c level corporate bean counter to package up his entire department, turn his infrastructure into some Iaas offering that cost WAY less than actually having real physical infrastructure, and then going the managed hosting / IT services route, which is WAY cheaper than having your own IT department...
The problem with IT, in the corporate world, is that IT people do not run it...some random c level manager does and all he wants to do is save money. That is all I hear from customers all day. "Duckbutta our IT department is costing us X amount of dollars if we give it to the company you work for will it be cheaper?" That answer will always be yes, and hardly ever does it go pass that. They don't care if their application is ready for the cloud ( i would never virtualize anything oracle, and though exchange is improved i have still seen some problems with it i would attribute to being virtualized" ) they just want it cheaper. They don't care that once we own their infrastructure and IT services we pretty much got them by the balls, it pretty much becomes so expensive to leave ( find floor space, hire IT people again, go to another company but oh wait who is gonna import your VM's to that new environment ) that at some point we start charging them out the ass and their is nothing they can do about it. But the guy who signed the contract doesn't care about that. All he cares about is that when something breaks he can blame the company i work for, when he want's some extra money in his pocket he can try to ding us for SLA's, and when he gets called at 3 am he can tell that person to call my company because "they own the IT".
As long as people like that are making decisions then virtualization will thrive, and these people have a strangle hold on the IT budget so they are not going anywhere
Saas is pretty much cloud as well...cause that software has to be hosted somewhere...and it is probably on some virtualized offering.
I would say Virtualization is completely different in that it is a substitute for physical infrastructure...and the savings, depening on your physical footprint...can get up into the 10 of millions...i worked on a project for a company where just consolidating 3 datacenters saved them almost 6 million dollars a year...we are talking about over 30,000 machines running 24/7 being turned into two USC chassis and Nexus switch running 24/7
Glad i got that groupon when i did