Some of the key reasons for the proliferation of cloud services and virtualization technologies in the enterprise are measurable business benefits, such as improved flexibility of managing computing resources, decreases in operating cost and total cost of ownership (TCO). Many management vendors recognized this opportunity and enhanced their product portfolios with capabilities for managing the performance of virtualization and cloud technologies. However, only a few of these vendors are actually offering management products that are based on virtualization technology or using SaaS as a delivery method. So this brings up the following question: If organizations can achieve significant business benefits from virtualization and the Cloud when managing their computing resources, can they achieve similar benefits from using these technologies for managing the performance of IT and business services?

The changes in the economic climate that happened in late 2008 and 2009 forced organizations to take a hard look into their IT spend and find areas where they can cut cost and still be able to support the needs of end-users. Some of the main areas that many of them identified where:

• They were paying for management capabilities that they were not using
• They had computing resources that were underutilized
• Their operational cost for managing IT performance was too high