IDC forecasted that by this year 70% of all servers would be virtualized and by 2016 virtualization would make up more than 20% of the market share. Gartner also championed the service in its last Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Services; revealing that the technology had scaled the “peak of inflated expectations”, traversed the “trough of disillusionment” and was inches from the much coveted “plateau of productivity”. With so much hype brewing around the technology – what can businesses expect from it in 2014?

The core concept of virtualization, and its promise to increase efficiency by severing the link between hardware and software, has become common in informed businesses. Indeed, there are now a huge range of examples, among a broad set of industries that demonstrate how to quickly take advantage of it.

However, exploiting its full potential is not always trivial. Some businesses out there have the resources and expertise to write their own tools and squeeze every ounce of possible value from the technology. But this is far from the norm. Not everyone has the people, the time, or the understanding to pursue this route. As a result, establishing more complex virtualized environments can still take many months and necessitate bringing in external consultants.

The next stage of maturity for virtualization involves unlocking a higher level of power with a new set of tools and platforms that forgo this additional software development time. Using these, enterprises can quickly collate a catalogue of services and operations that administrators can chain together in even the most complex workflows.

The results extend across the application development lifecycle, freeing up time for further innovation. Virtualization also makes it simpler to scale infrastructure to meet demand, move workload between platforms and handle tasks like disaster recovery. What was previously the reserve of advanced software technicians or businesses that could spare the resources will soon be available to all – small business to large enterprises.

The knock on effect of virtualization being available to all is an increasing wealth of possibilities for rapid delivery beyond infrastructure and applications. The next level of virtualization is all about providing complex end-to-end business services in an automated way and therefore the benefits of the technology will rise for every virtualized business.

Virtualization sits in an industry that fundamentally revolves around networking and automation. In a post-PRISM age where location and sovereignty of data are more important than ever, virtualization can be a key to this flexibility. It will now be able to handle the heavy lifting of data not only from server to server but from location to location as well. In some ways, the advancement of virtualization is even more reliant on the network for its potential than ever.

At the same time, broader changes are taking place in the virtualization ecosystem that enable and reinforce this evolution. For a while now, the popular Open Virtualisation Format (OVF) has helped businesses transition between hypervisor technologies and become the de facto standard among responsible vendors.

Last year saw the release and update to version 2.0, with the specification moving beyond its original VM-focused remit and adding support for surrounding strategic elements. This includes aspects like network configurations, workload placement policies and more. In effect, creating virtual environments with a keener strategic focus is easier than ever before. For example, automating the management of files and data ensures no two VMs providing the same function operate on the same underlying physical hardware.

By making it easier to define more complex operating environments, pre-configured templates can be quickly deployed with minimum intervention. This will improve delivery times; reduce reliance of human input and minimise cost, making virtualization very attractive to many businesses.

Superior orchestration of all these elements, combined with smarter interfaces that make managing them more accessible is key to the next phase: “software-defined everything”. On demand has always been the key concept in virtualization but the barriers to what that can be applied and the time it takes to do so are being reduced rapidly and will continue in 2014.