"I know real estate applications," the Business Analyst said confidently to the dozen of us cloistered in a conference room.
"And real estate applications don't work well when they're virtualized," she continued, face lowered, eyes peering directly at me over the rims of her Warby Parkers.
For a good 5-8 seconds, all you could hear was the whirring of the projector's fan as the Infrastructure team soaked in the magnitude of the statement.
I had come prepared for a lot of things in this meeting. I was asking for a couple hundred large, and I had spreadsheets, timelines, budgets, and a project plan. Hell, I even had an Excel document showing which switch port each new compute node would plug into, and whether that port would be trunked, access, or routed.
But I had nothing for this...this...whatever it was...challenge to my professional credibility? An admission of ignorance? Earnest doubt & fear?
It was, after all 2014, and the last IT Professional I knew who had resisted virtualization was early in the Obama administration...and now he was no longer in IT.
Before I could get in a chirpy, smart-ass "That sounds like a wager" or even a sincere "What's so special about your IIS/SQL application that it alone resists the push to virtual?" my boss leapt to my defense and, well, words were exchanged. My Russian dev friend and I glanced at each other as order broke down. The CIO raised both hands, then his voice, and ordered us to stop.