The opportunity is there, but are custom systems builders grabbing the virtualization brass ring? Virtualization and server consolidation are market drivers in the enterprise space as both big businesses and government rush toward data center consolidation. But my feeling is that too many systems builders aren’t capitalizing on the trend.

For one thing, systems builders face an uphill battle in getting a foot in the door at large corporations because of a bias toward sticking with branded systems from major vendors. And landing a spot on the approved list for federal, state or local government contracts is no easy task for custom systems builders. Still the opportunities are huge for systems builders in the virtualization and consolidation space. But it’s going to take more marketing.

For systems builders to sell virtualization to SMBs, they must first convince customers it’s not just a large enterprise play. The savings in hardware, energy and data management, and security costs that attract the big guys should be advantageous to small businesses if solution providers can explain and demonstrate the benefits. Small businesses don’t have data centers, you say. Then this should give systems builders a great opening to talk about managed services as a quick and inexpensive route to virtualization.

Component vendors led by Intel and AMD are strengthening systems builders’ hands by introducing low-power specialty processors that offer big improvements in energy savings for servers in a virtualization environment. Energy savings, fewer servers, better data management and security—what small business wouldn’t jump on that?