Thirdly, IT leaders can capitalise on being able to purchase the lowest cost storage resources, with "controlled growth on average by 20 per cent," said Neiker.

Still on the topic of storage virtualisation, Scott Drummonds, director, infrastructure and virtualisation specialists, Asia Pacific and Japan, EMC, shared his organisation's vision in this area.

"The future about virtualisation is going to be of self-service," said Drummonds. "It is the same way people are deploying cloud by setting up policies and allowing customers to self-service."

With virtual machines lending a helping hand in provisioning, "we are going to construct storage based on policies that is going to self-service deployed," he said.

IBM's Neiker and EMC's Drummonds took part in the next debate session, which focused on the newer iterations of virtualisation including storage virtualisation. Both speakers shared their views on case studies as well as strategy and key benefits for storage virtualisation implementations.