Sure, there are lots of notable women involved in enterprise technology operations, but they still make up only 5% of IT staffers, according to experts. Of the 17,000 VMworld 2010 guests, fewer than 400 of the female persuasion gathered in the upstairs ballroom at Moscone West for a program developed by Sonal Patel and JJ DiGeronimo, employed by VMware.

I was one of the lucky women present at the first Women in Technology event in the early ’90s, which kicked off with about as many participants as Women of Purpose, VMworld 2010. Back then, a fashionable St. John suit was recommended to women wanting to work in technology, along with sage advice to secure adequate household help. Over the years, more women’s groups have banded together to raise their collective profile in IT through mentoring and information technology strategizing. “I always aspired to have a career and leverage the education,” says Melissa Armstrong, vice president for technology infrastructure and operations at Fannie Mae in Washington, D.C., and a mother of seven children. What works for her? “Listen most, question often and speak least.”

Responding to colorful and honest queries and comments from the audience — ranging from “How do I move up?“ (answers: build relationships through face time, training and mentoring; be nimble and flexible because technology is always changing; do chores no one else wants to do; say to your manager, “I can do more for you, I am an underused asset.”) to a well-put rant on timeless booth bimbos — the panelists made it clear that they are women of substance. Marj Hutchings, vice president of Internet operations at Esurance, an auto insurance provider based in San Francisco, even granted that the “booth bimbos” are effective at what they do, which is to drive traffic into their space. “It’s a male-dominated industry,” she says with a shrug.

We were all at VMworld 2010 to learn about virtualization, a technology that helped Suzanne-Lee Haskell, vice president of strategy and planning for Pearson’s CIO group, achieve $27 million in savings. Adoption at the education and media company, based in New York, is through the roof, Haskell says, “wildly successful.” Meanwhile, Fannie Mae’s virtualization efforts have been a “journey of ‘show me,’” Armstrong says, in which the home mortgage organization is experimenting with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Karen Paratore, CIO of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, led the Houston-based law firm on a technological path that is now a 100% virtualized environment.

After the panel concluded, the talk at our table turned to the task of explaining virtualization. IT departments need to gain widespread buy-in from company executives and educate users before undertaking a virtualization effort. On the sales side, the challenge has been “getting the marketing folks to speak virtualization,” says a female engineer for IBM who has been pulled recently into a more explanatory, up-front role with customers.

At a session the previous day, a desktop architect at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. revealed a successful strategy for getting the business fired up: a tech fair. “It was a really great thing because people were calling to see when they could have this cool device,” says Kimberley Christiansen of the financial services firm, based in Denver and New York. Leave it to a woman to come up with an idea like that — and read more about it soon on SearchCIO.com.

This year, anecdotally, VMware said at its partner show that the majority of its customers are evaluating, testing or rolling out its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) product.

Last month, Citrix Systems said that 1,000 new customers bought its desktop virtualization technology in Q4 2009, with several customers buying more than 10,000 seats.

In addition, a very large food manufacturer plans to virtualize 10,000 desktops this year, according to a system integrator I spoke with who had interviewed a job applicant working on the project.

There aren’t many CIOs putting themselves out there as desktop virtualization pioneers on a large scale, however. There are risks involved, after all: The technology is not mature, the ROI is questionable, new strategies have to be developed to account for the capacity needs of a virtual infrastructure, and software companies are still trying to figure out how to support their applications in a virtual environment.

Yet companies are moving forward with desktop virtualization. Independent Bank Corp., out of Iona, Mich., for example, has 1,000 virtual desktops as part of its disaster recovery strategy.

Disaster recovery was not named as a top driver for desktop virtualization in an informal survey conducted by Forrester Research analyst Mark Bowker. What did top the list? Reduced capital expenses associated with traditional desktops, simplified application upgrades and deployments, and reduced operational expenses tied to supporting client devices.

Let us know what is moving desktop virtualization forward — or holding it back — at your company. Email ctorode@techtarget.com.