The SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) strategy of application delivery can create profound competitive value by aligning and integrating technologies more flexibly around business goals. Enterprises strive to align development, integration and testing activities in an agile way to achieve expected cost and time-to-market benefits by collaborating and sharing technology assets across teams.

However, realizing the value of SOA on a larger, enterprise-wide scale can be difficult, if not impossible, without also leveraging Virtualization. Once you split up development teams to deliver SOA, you realize that all these teams still need access to the system to complete their development and testing jobs if you are going to realize that cost and agility benefit. Like SOA, Virtualization is not something you simply buy -- it is something you must do.