An engineer held a meeting with 25 application owners to determine the group's interest in virtualizing their applications.  The engineer's presentation lasted about 25 minutes where he showed utilization numbers, footprint reduction in the datacenter, savings in power consumption, and every other metric he could think of to convince them of the advantages of virtualization.  When he was finished, he asked for anyone who was interested to setup an appointment with him.  Nobody did.  So what happened?
     The engineer had no story to tell.  He had no POC or pilot that he could peel back the layers of and show the application managers just what they would expect to see with their own virtualized environments.  People will not jump on board just because you read them bullets from a vendor's presentation, or you speak of some other organization's successes.  They jump on board because they can see, feel, and touch the success of another team and they want some of the same results.
     As my friend John Hoffler often says, you cannot get agreement or commitment from application teams unless they are incentivised.  Meaning, if you cannot demonstrate the advantages of virtualization through cost savings and other expense avoidance that directly impacts their bottom line, there will be no motivation.  I certainly cannot blame them.