Both vendors and IT organizations need to make plans for the impact virtualization is going to have on service-oriented architecture (SOA) development and testing, says Theresa Lanowitz, founder and CEO of the Voke Inc. research firm. She is the author of Virtual Lab Automation Market Snapshot, an independent survey of organizations already using virtualization in their application development and testing labs.

"Virtualization is going to cause people to take a different look at how they're doing things all the way from the data center down to the development level and into the production environment," she said. "Every enterprise needs to be aware of how they are going to use virtualization. Every software vendor needs to have a virtualization strategy.

Lanowitz compares virtualization for SOA application development and testing to the impact the Web had on companies in the late 1990s, when every organization needed a Web strategy.