The premise of this paper is simple enough; that there exists a natural 'complementarity' between the wide variety of virtualization projects (VPs) being undertaken by enterprises and the built-in super-versatility offered by Next Generation Networks (NGNs). The two technologies fit together hand-in-glove and in combination provide enterprise IT managers with a fluid and dynamic ICT resource capable of delivering step change improvements in corporate agility.

Organisations are using virtualization technologies to dynamically allocate IT resource to where it is needed, in real time and in support of critical business processes.

Significant improvements in responsiveness are achievable when organisations use virtualization (and service oriented architectures) to unshackle their dependency on static IT resources. However these benefits are only fully realised in the absence of any constraints imposed by the underlying communications network.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the rich tapestry of tools and features offered by the core NGN platform enable and enhance the scope, performance and utility of any VP, thereby delivering a truly versatile real-time infrastructure (RTI) at a lower cost point than legacy networking infrastructures.