At the 35th annual international meeting of the Computer Measurement Group (see link), a group of professionals dedicated to performance management and capacity planning, the hot topics were (surprise!) virtualization and clouds.
We were presented with stories of companies with hundreds and even thousands of servers. Some of these have utilizations as low as 7%. Clearly, a lot of opportunity to save money and energy exists.
Beyond capacity management, there is a growing awareness for the business impact of bad performance on user experience. A number of vendors are coming up with interesting, if not powerful, solutions to create visibility on the business level of technical issues.