Enterprise IT departments strive to contribute to the competitiveness of the business organization, developing and deploying innovative applications that can help benefit the bottom line and drive top-line growth. Too often, however, IT managers find themselves unable to develop and deploy applications with the agility they would like. The skills needed to quickly design, test, configure and integrate applications into complex IT environments can be difficult to find, and expert IT staff can quickly become overwhelmed by demand. Virtualization technology has helped drive efficiency improvements through consolidation of workloads and to a lesser extent through the management of systems and workloads. Now virtual application patterns from IBM take these capabilities a significant step further. This paper shows how IT organizations can use patterns of expertise provided by virtual application patterns to speed deployments, reduce the risk of error, and help simplify and automate tasks across the management and maintenance life cycle.