SYS-CON Events announced today that mindSHIFT, the leading technology provider to small and medium-sized organizations, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 5th International Virtualization Conference & Expo, which will take place on March 30-April 1, 2009, in New York City. The event is expected to attract over 1,200 developers, engineers, architects, IT managers, and hardware and software professionals of every stripe.

Virtualization is reorganizing the IT industry. It underpins cloud computing by making it possible to separate the software from the hardware - Amazon Web Services is the largest cloud-based virtualization effort...and AWS is literally changing the world of IT as we knew it. Overall, the virtualization market has grown from approximately $560 million in 2005 to a forecasted $2.7 billion in 2009, according to IDC. According to Gartner, virtualization will be the highest-impact IT trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012.

While data center virtualization is still the #1 market segment, it's starting to get competition from application virtualization, storage virtualization, I/O virtualization and virtualization for end users - so called endpoint virtualization. In fact, in almost any credible survey of Top Technology Trends for 2009, Virtualization and Cloud computing topped the list. In Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009, it ranked #1, up from #5 last year.

SYS-CON's 5th International Virtualization Conference & Expo will be looking at every flavor of virtualization. Top speakers drawn from the very highest echelons of the industry will be presenting in breakout and general sessions on aspects ranging far beyond server virtualization to virtualization management tools and virtualized desktop infrastructure, para-virtualization, security and compliance issues, Green IT, cloud and datacenter filesystems, distributed I/O resource management, database management in virtualized environments, secure mobile device virtualization, and resource management and load balancing issues for very large clusters of up to 100,000 nodes.

Help plant your flag in the fast-expanding business opportunity that is Virtualization. Register today!