7/30/2019 Competitive Business Continuty

1/10

African Journal of Business Management Vol. 4(10), pp. 2164-2173, 18 August, 2010Available online at http://www.academicjournals.org/ajbmISSN 1993-8233 2010 Academic Journals

Full Length Research Paper

Towards virtualization: A competitive businesscontinuity

Tuncay Ercan

Department of Computer Engineering, Yasar University, University cad. No:35-3735100 Bornova, Izmir-Turkey.E-mail: tuncay.ercan@yasar.edu.tr. Tel: 00902324115287. Fax: 00902324115020.

Accepted 1 July, 2010

The ultimate goal of all businesses no matter in which sectors they operate is to maintain theirprofitability and growth. There is a relationship among the capital, investment, and the personnel in

order to achieve objectives for the performance of the organizational systems and it must bemaintained without any deterioration. Companies have a chance to compete with other firms in thenational and international arena through this relationship, and of course within the limits specified bytheir capitals. The level of success targeted with the suitable investments, qualified personnel and thecapabilities of todays technology is possible for today, at least with a fixed capital for a certain periodof time in this relationship. Companies can provide many benefits by using and managing thecapabilities offered by virtualization. In this study, we present the results of a survey conducted in 100small and medium-sized companies in the transportation and services sectors located in Izmir (Turkey).The analysis of this survey will enable a better understanding of virtualization services and motivateespecially Information Technologies (IT) staff as a detailed framework for the companies working indifferent industrial sectors.

Key words: Virtualization, outsourcing, cloud computing, small and medium-sized businesses.

INTRODUCTION

Business problems are inevitable and the companies canface with difficulties that block and reduce their activitiesto maintain, regardless of their size, number ofemployees and industrial sectors. However, there aresome possible solutions that will handle your business.Outsourcing of required business processes that areready to be used by all sectors is now changing the wayhow to run organizational business. Unfortunately, thebiggest impact in the future will be an inevitable decline in

the companys information systems staff. Companiestransfer some of their activity-based applications andservices to the other companies that specialize in thatfield. So that, organizations get rid of unnecessary unitsand become more lean and flexible through theoutsourcing issue. This will both cut costs and acceleratedecision-making processes and of course will facilitatethe companys focus on the main business objectives.

Effects of globalization and increasing competitionmotivate companies to produce more quality, cheaperand faster. Therefore, organizations transfer theirbusinesses that they did not use their talents and focus

on their core competencies, in order to protect theircompetitive advantages in the market. Thanks to theemerging telecommunications technologies, there is acontinuous communication between employees even ithey are not in the same place. As a result, new struc-tures such as virtualization and their significant branchesgrid computing and cloud computing have emerged.

In this study, we will seek answers about how smaland mid-sized companies can improve their IT

infrastructure to increase performance and make overalbusinesses easier, more flexible and effective. In the las5 - 10 years, the idea of virtualization and its businessbenefits have spread to virtually every different aspects oInformation Technologies. Today, virtualization is a hottopic in IT, by consolidating servers, workstationsstorage devices, applications and the network itself.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) areeconomically and socially an element of balance in ourcountry as it is in the whole world. SMBs of course havesome problems to apply necessary financial methodsfunctional problems like technology transfer, benefit from

7/30/2019 Competitive Business Continuty

2/10

high-level professional management, and strategydevelopment. It is very important to resolve all theseissues to sustain their economic interests. SMBs havebeen defined by the Ministry of Industry and Trade (inTurkey) through the regulation published in 2005 andsummarized in Table 1.

Todays challenging business environment forcesdifferent types of organizations to allocate a certainamount of capital for their IT facilities that manage nearlyeverything within the organization and conduct businessactivities. This brings important requirements for infor-mation systems and raises a great challenge to vendorsof hardware and software products in the market. Ownersand the managers of SMBs try to afford these expensesrelated to specific commercial applications and userservices.

They should decide if these expenses are worth to pay.Virtualization can be combined to optimize availability ofrequired services while reducing the total cost ofownership, right-sizing of resources, eliminating legacyhardware and software, and enhancing flexibility. Anarticle published in (Scientific Subjects, 2009) stated thatvirtualization can respond quickly and effectively to thedemands of high-throughput for the organizationalapplications. It also described many other virtualizationfeatures such as, the re-allocation of the requiredresources between the virtual machines, the loaddistribution by creating new virtual machines, transferringnetwork devices, processor, memory and storage poolsto the required applications, allocating faster servers andstorage systems into high-demand processes.

This paper has the following contributions:

1. A novel and practical analysis for virtualization studiesin SMBs located in Izmir (Turkey),2. A real framework for how and why SMBs adaptoutsourcing types for their IT systems,3. The effects of e-marketing and e-business activitiesthrough virtualization,4. A comprehensive literature review on virtualization.

PREVIOUS STUDIES

If we categorize the previous studies according to thegeneral issues highlighted, we may have the following

different topics:

1. Automated IT systems and their benefits2. Development in telecommunications and transmissiontechnologies3. Virtualization concepts and principles4. Business competitiveness5. Other services

The biggest expectation of the companies for thevirtualization is the automation that it brings into their

Ercan 2165

Table 1. Official small and medium-sized businesses definition.

Organization

type

Number of

employees