Verizon Business announced a new professional services offering today that will enable businesses to adopt virtualization, which in turn enables more efficient use of data-center and server resources. Verizon’s new offering is based in part on its gold certification as a VMware Authorized Consultant.

Virtualization enables multiple applications to reside on a single server, said Jeffrey Deacon, product marketing and Virtualization Principal at Verizon Business. “Traditionally, an enterprise would have one application to one server, or one or two apps on one server,” Deacon said. “If an enterprise has 10 applications, such as human resources, ERP, sales-force automation, Web-based apps – that’s 10 servers. At any one time, most of those servers are only running at 20% utilization. What virtualization allows you to do is take 10 physical machines and allow all 10 apps to use those machines, as a shared resource.”

The process of doing that has many elements, however, and enterprises may not have the internal expertise to assess their own situation and determine what can be virtualized. Verizon Business’ professional services offering provides the expertise to evaluate a company’s specific situation, make recommendations as to the most efficient approach and managed the transition to virtualization, Deacon said. As a VMware Authorized Consultant, Verizon Business also has access to tools such as VMware’s Capacity Planner that are not generally available.

“VMware is the software that would run on the server that would manage the 10 applications running on one server rather than on 10,” Deacon said. “We have management tools that allow us to monitor utilization rates to run the server at 80% utilization rather than 20%. When a server starts to spike, through VMware tools, we can, in real time, move virtual machines from one physical server to another with no interruptions.”