Identifying critical factors for corporate implementing virtualization technology Shing-Han Li a,⇑ , David C. Yen b,1 , Chung-Chiang Hu c,2 , Wen-Hui Lu c,3 , Yung-Chen Chiu a,4 a Department of Information Management, Tatung University, Taiwan b Department of Information Systems and Analytics, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056, United States c Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Tatung University, Taiwan article info Article history: Available online 4 August 2012 Keywords: Virtualization Key factor analysis Key successful factor KSF abstract Virtualization technology has attracted great attention with its advantages of multiple platform opera- tion and resultant cost and power reduction. This study investigated the key factors for corporations to implement virtualization information environment from the viewpoint of IT staffs. Through purposeful sampling, 400 effective questionnaires were collected from IT personnel currently working in the virtu- alization-related fields. From key factor analysis, seven influential factors were identified for corporations to implement virtualization. These seven factors include: (1) system quality, (2) information quality, (3) simplified management and maintenance, (4) integration of resources, (5) cost reduction, (6) ease of deployment, test and development, and (7) organizational consensus. Based on the obtained findings, suggestions for corporations and to IT system integrators were provided to the implementation of virtu- alization information environment. The scales developed in this study provide useful measures to study common factors of the implementation of virtualization information technology. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Cloud computing issue has become one of the greatest concerns to the IT field in the 21st century. The features of cloud computing technology may include super-large scale, dynamic scalability, and on-demand deployment in which virtualization plays a central role and the industry realizes its importance and begins to implement it (Li & Yang, 2010). Virtualization has such advantage as having a single server to carry multiple operating systems. It not only saves the quantity of purchased servers, reduces the management and the maintenance costs, but also reduces the consumption of elec- tricity and cooling power. The global market of virtualization tech- nology is now on the rise. According to the forecast by Global Industry Analysts, Inc., the global virtualization software market is projected to reach US$11.98 billions by 2015 (Global Industry Analysts, Inc. [GIA], 2010). The success of a new technology requires the careful coordina- tion from various aspects. For virtualization technology, most prior studies focused on aspects in the information engineering domain such as principles, architecture, performance tuning, and backup mechanism of virtualization. However, in the process of adopting virtualization technology, the opinions from engineers who are in charge of managing and maintaining the system must be taken into serious consideration to ensure a successful implementation. So far, limited studies have been found regarding the analysis of the key factors influencing corporations’ implementing virtualiza- tion technology from the viewpoints of IT staff. As a result, for those corporations in the evaluation process of whether or not to introduce virtualization technology, this subject is certainly worth of discussion. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. After the introduc- tory section, Section 2 reviews literatures regarding virtualization and its key factors for implementation. The next section discusses the research methodology including questionnaire design and sampling. Section 4 focuses on statistical analysis of research data. A conclusion is given in Section 5 which also addresses the impli- cations, contributions and future research directions in this subject field. 2. Literature review 2.1. Virtualization The concept of virtualization was originated in the 1960s when mainframes were highly expensive. IBM divided a UNIX mainframe into multiple logic units in order to enable users to fully utilize a mainframe’s calculation resources. 0747-5632/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.06.032 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +886 2 25925252x3610; fax: +886 2 25853966. E-mail addresses: shli@ttu.edu.tw (S.-H. Li), Yendc@muohio.edu (D.C. Yen), cchu@ttu.edu.tw (C.-C. Hu), d9906007@ms.ttu.edu.tw (W.-H. Lu), scottchiu@ohga. com.tw (Y.-C. Chiu). 1 Tel.: +1 513 529 4827. 2 Tel.: +886 2 21822928x6870. 3 Tel.: +886 2 21822928x6785. 4 Tel.: +886 9 19378867. Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012) 2244–2257 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Computers in Human Behavior journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh