For the IT staff at Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I., the focus for the last couple of years has been on consolidation. First on centralizing servers that had been scattered across the campus into two physical locations, then on using virtualization technologies to consolidate things even more.

"Real estate is very tough to come by on our campus," says Rich Siedzik, director of computer and telecommunications services at the 3,600-student school. "So we're trying to consolidate and collapse things now into one physical location. We're trying to put them into a much smaller footprint."

To do that, the school is standardizing on IBM BladeCenter servers - running IBM Power and Intel Xeon processors - and taking advantage of virtualization technologies. While IBM Power has virtualization capabilities built in, Bryant University is one of a growing number of organizations using VMware - or other third-party software - to virtualize x86-based systems.

VMware created the market for x86 virtualization in 2001, but industry experts predict 2006 is the year when the technology will finally take off. For one thing, Intel and AMD are starting to roll out chips with virtualization capabilities baked in.

Silicon-supported virtualization will make software from VMware, Microsoft and others run better and let those vendors focus on higher-level management tools. It also will lay the foundation for virtualization tools from others. For example, the open source Xen virtualization technology will support Linux and Windows when it runs on virtualization-enabled processors.