"Virtualization is enabling companies of all sizes to reduce the cost and complexity of IT," said Ben Matheson, director of small and medium businesses at VMware, as the virtualization leader this week announced three new VMware Infrastructure product packages tailored for SMBs. The bundles are expected to be available later this year.

"For SMBs," Matheson continued, "this means optimizing existing IT investments while providing enterprise-class benefits of virtualization such as disaster recovery, high availability, simplified IT management and reduced energy costs."

"Deploying virtualization translates into better service levels," he continued, "and it enables customers to spend less on IT and reinvest these savings in their businesses. The new VMware Infrastructure packaging delivers the features, functionality and training that will help enable SMBs to more rapidly experience the value of virtual infrastructure."

According to industry analyst firm The Yankee Group, virtualization deployments among SMBs -- companies with less than 100 servers or fewer than 1,000 employees -- is expected to double during the next two years.

"Virtualization has become a mainstream technology force, influencing IT architecture decisions for companies of all sizes," said Gary Chen, senior analyst at The Yankee Group. "For SMBs, this means evaluating the A-to-Z benefits of virtualization such as server consolidation, business continuity and disaster recovery for use on current IT assets while planning for future growth. The new VMware Infrastructure 3 Acceleration Kits provide a cost-effective way for SMBs to get started with virtualization quickly while enabling the organization to scale as their business needs evolve. We see virtualization adoption as a trend in the SMB space that will continue to aggressively grow over time."

The SMB bundles are based on the latest release of VMware Infrastructure, the industry's third-generation software suite. The product brings new offerings that are designed to decrease power consumption, eliminate manual tracking and patching of virtual infrastructure and increase overall infrastructure availability.

For more information about these SMB offerings, readers can visit http://www.vmware.com/smb.