At the end of 2005, 30,000+ SYS-CON.com readers enjoyed the benefits of industry legend Mitchell Kertzman's prescience about virtualization. Already back then, Kertzman – now at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners but still famous for having been the founder and CEO of Powersoft, which merged with Sybase in February 1995 – was clear how central a role virtualization was about to start playing in the IT landscape.

"With three strong virtualization platforms (VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server and XenSource) now available," Kertzman declared, "there will be more and more software products built not on traditional hardware/software platforms, but on virtualized platforms." 

He advised readers, for example,  to "Check out Akimbi Systems, which provides a very exciting application for QA and test in the enterprise."

Now virtualization is so hot an IT topic that there's even an entire Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 devoted to it. As the panel above shows.