Many meanings to many people.  In its humble beginnings at IBM, it allowed companies to utilize expensive mainframes by running numerous applications at the same time under a single hardware footprint.  With the introduction of IBM’s AIX (Unix) Environment, we see the use of similar technology but on smaller, less costly hardware.  Pretty soon, the use of virtualization becomes status quo for those environments.  Other companies in the Unix world begin to try and follow suit (i.e., Hewlett Packard and SUN).
 
During all of this breakthrough technology, PC servers continue to proliferate and soon become a major issue in datacenters due to the sheer numbers and the cost to run them.
 
Flash forward to 1998.  A small company is founded to provide virtualization technology to the Intel/AMD world.  They call themselves VMWare, and the product begins to take hold of the PC Server market place.  Due to the capabilities of the software, and the incredible ROI it provides, the company takes off like a rocket going into orbit.  In 2008, 10 years after their founding, their revenue exceeds 1.9 Billion Dollars and has over 130,000 customers.  It’s no wonder EMC acquired them and took them public.  Pretty soon there are numerous vendors vying for their place in this market (i.e., Microsoft, XEN, Parallels, etc.)
 
But virtualization on the PC server platform used to mean consolidation of many physical servers running at low utilization rates to less physical servers running many applications on virtual servers enabling businesses to realize hard dollar savings through the reduction of power, cooling and floorspace. So much for the old way of doing things.
 
Flash forward one more time.  Virtualization has now emerged as a key strategic weapon for not only consolidation, but for delivering business services on-time while also meeting SLAs never before considered.  Disaster recover, maintenance repair, and updates to hardware and software can all done in “real-time” without taking the business down to do so. 
 
In the face of a very challenging business climate, companies must consider all options that afford them cost containment, while still allowing the business to sustain its growth through new applications and areas of revenue growth to maintain their competitive edge.
 
Virtualization is alive and well and thriving in today’s new world.