Merrill Lynch has signed an enterprise agreement to standardise on VMware's virtual machine product line in its production environment and at 27,000 desktops throughout the organisation.
Merrill is to use the technology - which can run multiple operating environments from a single consolidated system - across an array of applications including server consolidation, software lifecycle management and application compatibility.
John McKinley, chief technology officer at Merrill Lynch, says: "By embracing virtualisation technology and standardising on VMware for managing our software development environments, Merrill Lynch has seen a 40-50% cost savings."
McKinley says Merrill Lynch consolidated the workloads of five servers onto just one enterprise-class server, saving money on hardware and maintenance costs and streamlining development and test processes in its production environment.
Merrill also used VMware Workstation to migrate to Windows XP while running mission-critical legacy applications on Windows NT safely.