Excessive industry hype has left CIOs reluctant to embrace desktop virtualisation. According to a new survey, half of private sector CIOs believe the technology is promising more than it can deliver.

Server virtualisation is rapidly becoming an accepted part of the corporate IT infrastructure - and now industry experts are predicting that it won't be long until corporate desktops follow suit. Desktop virtualisation refers to the running of a PC's operating system within a central datacentre. Users have a screen and terminal (or thin client) on their desk, which connects to the operating system running on the server via the local network. To the user, the experience is similar to the operating system running on their physical machine but in reality the processes are run and the data is stored in a central location.

Encouraging businesses to go green is good but the government must better incorporate outsourcing in its carbon control scheme, says the NOA's Mark Kobayashi-Hillary Much is being said about the UK government's upcoming Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) scheme but it remains unclear how much of this talk is translating into action and what impact the scheme will have on the outsourcing and offshoring industries.

Zurich Financial Services has announced an outsourcing megadeal. The company said yesterday is has signed a 10 and a half year deal with CSC to supply datacentre and IT services.

Enterprise take-up of unified communications - the merging of IP telephony, conferencing and collaboration, messaging and communications tools - is on a "steeply rising curve", according to analysts. Spending on UC among businesses worldwide is expected to rise from just $302m last year to $4.2bn in five years' time, according to industry watchers ABI Research.

Unified communications is migrating to the cloud, new research has found. According to a report by analysts In-Stat, tech vendors are now working closely with providers of hosted VoIP services, leading to several flavours of unified communications now emerging from the cloud.

Adoption rates of virtualisation have yet to match the hype surrounding it, here Andrew Donoghue hears from businesses who've already taken the plunge. Despite vendors touting the numerous benefits that virtualisation can bestow on businesses that adopt the technology, there is a flaw in the rhetoric that is hard to get around: not many companies are actually adopting virtualisation.

A unified communications project is all too often a daunting prospect for a CIO. UC is a broad topic - and a deployment can bring with it both unexpected benefits and unforeseen pitfalls.

Unified comms holds plenty of promise but businesses hoping to use it must first consider why uptake has been so slow, says Jim Mortleman. Vendors may be making a lot of noise about unified communications and collaboration (UCC) but the promised panacea remains a pipe dream for most organisations. Despite having been touted as the likely number two strategic technology for 2008 by Gartner, it fell to number five on the 2009 list and does not appear at all in the analyst's top 10 for 2010.

With the government hoping to offset or reduce all the CO2 emissions produced by its fleet of half a million computers by 2012, IT is under more pressure than ever to go green. As a result, the public sector has "stopped eating pies and put ourselves on a diet" when it comes to carbon, according to the government's green IT champion, Chris Chant.

Businesses that want to use green IT to save big bucks need to look beyond the server room and start getting creative with their business software. Companies should stop thinking that green IT ends with ramping up server utilisation or replacing desktop PCs with thin clients, Warren Wilson, senior analyst with Ovum, told the Green IT Expo in London this week.

Virtualisation? So I get to put on a funky headset and walk around a simulated landscape shooting aliens?Okay, enough with the virtual reality of yesteryear. We're talking about virtualisation in terms of the creation of a virtual version of something - such as a server or storage device. What's the point of that? If it's virtual it can't do anything useful in the real world, can it? Just because you can't reach out and touch something doesn't mean it isn't real - or extremely useful to businesses.

In an exclusive interview, Wikipedia founder and silicon.com Agenda Setter Jimmy Wales talks to Natasha Lomas about what's next for Wikipedia and why the site needs geeks of all kinds. If you've ever written something about Jimmy Wales and posted it online, chances are he's read it. He mentions a Twitter post I made, prior to our interview, asking whether people think he's a hero or villain.

It's no surprise that for some companies green initiatives are dropping down the list of IT priorities. In a recent silicon.com survey, more than a quarter of respondents admitted green IT was off the agenda because of the recession. But many organisations have found the key is to align green goals with broader cost-cutting initiatives - which are definitely in vogue with CIOs and CFOs. In some cases government policies are already giving businesses a shove in the right direction. For example, in July 2008, the UK government informed 10,000 businesses that they could be affected by the Carbon Reduction Commitment - a climate change and energy-saving scheme that will take effect in 2010.

It might not currently be as widespread as industry hype might have it - but server virtualisation is poised to grow rapidly as smaller businesses catch on to the benefits. Server virtualisation allows multiple instances of an operating system to run simultaneously within one physical server, cutting the amount of hardware organisations have to buy and manage. And because fewer physical servers are required, virtualisation also helps to cut energy costs: no small thing for CIOs and CFOs after a recent study found that, thanks to rocketing energy prices, it now costs more to power some servers than to buy them in the first place.

2009 may not be over yet but analysts have already revealed the top 10 strategic techs that CIOs should be looking at next year. According to Gartner, the 10 strategic technologies will have an impact on the enterprise over the next three years, with IT chiefs encouraged to make decisions on them within the next two.

It's never been easy being green, especially when it comes to electricity-hungry IT infrastructure. And in the midst of a recession, with cost cutting a priority, it's easy to let slide worthy targets such as becoming carbon neutral - especially if the choice is between a project to shrink the carbon footprint of IT and one that could ensure the company makes a profit in these difficult times.

Unified communications (UC) implementations bring together a variety of digital communication tools to make it easier for users to collaborate and improve business processes. For example it might mean bringing together instant messaging, presence information, video conferencing, as well as email, SMS, fax and voicemail to improve productivity, and potentially trim the cost of an organisations' IT infrastructure.

The mighty twin combination of cost-cutting (driven by the recession) and a desire to reduce IT power consumption (to tackle climate change) means virtualisation has become one of the hottest topics for the IT community, with a whole raft of associated terms such as bare metal hypervisors, virtual machines, and utilisation rates becoming standard parts of the vocabulary of the average CIO. Virtualisation, is essentially about cutting the connection between the operating system and the underlying hardware it operates on.

While workers might create outlandish avatars to escape the restraints and monotony of their everyday lives, this may soon become a thing of the past as they are forced to dress their avatars appropriately for work and adhere to a code of conduct within 3D virtual environments. An avatar is a virtual representation of the computer user, and can consist of anything from a two-dimensional icon to an animated 3D figure. And businesses are increasingly experimenting with virtual worlds - such as Second Life - to cut costs by conducting meetings online.

Revealed - the silicon.com 2009 Agenda Setters list. Find out who are the movers and shakers who make the global tech industry tick. Who has the upper hand - the business leaders, the CIOs or the entrepreneurs? It's all here in our exclusive tenth annual poll.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been named the most influential individual in the global technology industry, topping the silicon.com 2009 Agenda Setter's list. Jobs has made pole position on the list for the second time (the first time being in 2003) - the only person to have achieved this feat in the 10-year history of the list.

Steve Ranger, silicon.com editor and panel chair Steve Ranger is responsible for the overall content on silicon.com spanning news, analysis and special coverage. An editor at silicon.com for more than four years, he has a decade of experience in technology journalism. Areas of expertise include the public sector, offshoring, security and web 2.0. Simon Briskman, lawyer Simon Briskman specialises in outsourcing and IT law at Field Fisher Waterhouse and has considerable commercial in-house experience, having spent three years with Fujitsu Services. His work covers an assortment of sectors, including telecoms, financial services and retail, and his clients range from start-ups to some of the world's biggest names.

At RSA's Anti-Fraud Command Centre (AFCC) in Herzelia, Israel, more than 100 staff work to detect, dissect and block phishing sites and Trojan attacks 24 hours per day. From the AFCC, the security firm sifts through more than 10 million emails every day, as well as domain names and fraudster chat rooms, searching for threats to its customers, which include a selection of Britain's high street banks.

Noshir Kaka is a director in the Mumbai office of analyst house McKinsey & Company. In an exclusive interview, silicon.com reporter Nick Heath spoke to Kaka about his forthcoming report on how India's 50 per cent share of the global offshore technology and business services market could slip away by 2020. To view the full article Strengthening India's offshoring industry, just published on McKinsey Quarterly, click here.