Smartphone development is a tough market to break into. Microsoft tried with its Windows Phone, but that was a fruitless venture. This year, Google plans to have a go in the same market with the Google Pixel, a smartphone that looks every bit as promising as the latest iteration of the iPhone.

Server-hosted delivery of client applications is hardly new. Whether it was Microsoft Windows Terminal Services back in 1996 or the Remote Desktop Services of today, it has been around for a while now. With client virtualization, boundaries of traditional networks are done away with to allow rich client applications and environments to endpoints.

Software developers make a profit by selling us the best product they can create. When selling pieces of their software in bulk they offer licensing packages to businesses so you don’t have to buy 100 copies of the same CD. Simple enough, right? Well, now that an increasing amount of services and tools are moving into the cloud it’s a lot harder to track how many licenses you’ll need and how much they’ll cost.

Before you start purchasing any new hardware, consider virtualizing your IT infrastructure. Virtualization means to abstract the software from the hardware. Basically, as processors have increased in power and memory capacity, one physical server can now act as five virtual servers.

For many businesses, managing and maintaining their entire hardware and software infrastructure can be a daunting and prohibitively expensive task. But with the inception of virtualization, this is no longer an issue. Virtualization allows businesses to maximize the use of their IT resources at a reduced cost - this is why it has become so popular in the past few years.