Despite tighter budgets driven by the fragile economy, IT departments remain under intense pressure to deliver additional and higher-performance computing, network and application services worldwide. To achieve their “do more with less” goals, they need to transform their datacenters using a combination of consolidation, virtualization, and automation. Once these initiatives are properly established, IT can extend the virtual edge of the datacenter to branch offices where high-performance services are delivered locally from centrally managed infrastructure. This whitepaper will discuss the changing role of branch IT in the age of datacenter transformation.