Why do organizations adopt virtualization technology?

Although a few goals stand out because they are cited again and again by organizational decision-makers, there are as many hopes and dreams for virtualization adoption as there are organizations.

One group, those who seek out access virtualization solutions, want to offer staff members, partners and customers ways to get to applications and data from any device over just about any network from just about anywhere. Some would tack on their desire to reduce the cost and complexity of desktop or laptop systems. Often these folks remember the days of putting a dumb terminal on someone's desk and having that person use the device for more than a decade without having to upgrade the device, its software or even make configuration changes.

Another group, those who seek out application virtualization solutions, are often wanting to obtain the agility, reliability and availability that comes from being able to treat all of their industry standard systems as if they were a large pool of resources that could be allocated and orchestrated in real time so the organization could meet its service level objectives. Some would also wish that applications wouldn't have to be installed on staff, partner or customer systems until needed and then would quietly disappear after they were no longer needed so that they could be reused somewhere else.

Still another group, those who seek out processing virtualization solutions, want to use their physical systems as if they were merely "processing modules." That is, they want the ability to link them together for scalability or performance reasons or load one of them up with many tasks to keep it fully utilized and happy. Some would like the additional capability of mixing and matching operating environments so that their applications could be hosted on whatever physical machine best fit its requirements at the moment and moved somewhere else later without causing the appearance of a failure or slowdown.

There are a few other overarching goals but, I'll look into them later.

If your organization is using virtualization technology, what goals is it trying to achieve?