The virtualization industry has exploded this past year and at the forefront of this innovative realm of technology has been Carousel Industries, which designs, implements, manages and maintains innovative communication networks for enterprise customers all over the country. Through leveraging a single–source approach, Carousel offers a wide portfolio of solutions that is comprised of IP telephony, data infrastructure, unified communications, power and cooling, IVR, wireless, security, speech applications and much more.

I recently had the chance to speak with a company official from Carousel in regards to the biggest trends they noticed this year, company plans for 2012 and predictions for the virtualization market overall, and some newly released technologies that could potentially revolutionize the virtualization market.

Looking at the most popular trends in 2011, the company highlighted server virtualization, slow but steady exploration of virtual desktops and much improved backup or DR solutions. Back in September, Carousel joined forces with Juniper Networks (News - Alert) to host an informative webinar about how to seamlessly integrate fully secure virtualized data centers into business operations. A topic of discussion during the event was the vGW Virtual Gateway (News - Alert), which ensures a high level of security is in place within virtual environments through use of a hypervisor-based firewall that provides enhanced visibility, monitoring and reporting.

Through enabling customers to gain access to these additional functionalities, users can easily visualize the full ROI of virtualization while simultaneously keeping up with rigorous compliance policies that can transition in real-time as virtual machines rapidly evolve.

In 2011, Carousel also completed several strategic acquisitions, which significantly increased its overall value and capabilities that it provide to customers. Some of the key acquisitions completed during these twelve months include Juma (News - Alert) Technology Corp and OmniPresence.

As we move into the New Year, the company will be continuing to focus their efforts on reducing the costs of VDI adoption, enhancing VDI in the call center, cloud computing- both private and hybrid solutions and backup and DR solutions. Having already won the prestigious award as being named as the 2011 Avaya (News - Alert) U.S. Data Partner of the Year, the company achieved this recognition due to its remarkable revenue performance that it achieved with Avaya technology sales throughout the year.

“More clients will look to move from the exclusive realm of server virtualization to private cloud. In addition, they are going to be looking more at a private cloud being delivered and managed by a service provider (in 2012),” company officials forecasted.

Furthermore, according to Carousel Industries, some new technologies that will be launched on the market that could change the direction of the virtualization industry include, “Atlantis Computing and their ability to aggregate desktop I/O in a virtual environment, as they claim to be able to reduce storage requirements by 30 percent. This could potentially bring down the cost per virtual desktop by 40 percent. In addition, the maturation of VMware’s vCloud Director solution which was initially introduced as an enterprise level solution, but now more mid-market companies are continuing to look at implementing this technology.”

To see exactly where the market heads next year, be sure to stay tuned to the virtualization community, exclusively on TMCnet.