As we enter 2013, the technology foundation of our businesses is changing dramatically as every layer of the network and service delivery stack can now be abstracted. The final holdout of genuinely "hard" hardware was the network, but even that's going virtual. When we asked about software-defined networks in the InformationWeek 2013 Virtualization Management Survey, we found more interest in SDNs than in our SDN-specific survey just a few months earlier.

Higher up the stack, 42% of the 320 business technology respondents to our virtualization survey say their companies use multiple hypervisors, up from 36% in August 2011, and 11 of the 13 hypervisors we asked about are in use by more than 10% of respondents, compared with eight hypervisors two years ago. In this year's InformationWeek Global CIO Survey, 92% of respondents say they plan to increase their use of server virtualization, even ahead of expanding business intelligence (85%) and improving information security (84%). In our InformationWeek 2012 IT Spending Priorities Survey, improving security, increasing server virtualization, and upgrading the network and storage infrastructures came in atop a list of 16 projects competing for budgets.

However, the end goal of all of this virtualization--flexible, service-oriented IT that can respond quickly to business needs--is still a precarious proposition because it requires extensive automation and orchestration. That's a big worry for IT teams faced with coaxing performance out of highly virtualized, highly fragmented stacks using management technologies inadequate to the task.

In fact, confidence in next-generation virtualization technologies is low among many IT professionals we work with, even as use rises. Why? For one thing, the hypervisor wars aren't over--they're escalating. While VMware remains king of the hill in terms of functionality and market share, Microsoft's Hyper-V continues ...