Virtualisation software revenue is set to increase by 43 per cent this year
Gartner predicts virtualisation to snowball
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13 Feb 2009, Phil Muncaster , V3
Software virtualisation is likely to continue apace this year, as firms look to reduce costs and improve resource utilisation in their IT environments, according to new figures from analyst firm Gartner.
Worldwide virtualisation software revenue will increase 43 per cent from $1.9bn (£1.3bn) last year to $2.7bn (£1.85bn) in 2009, according to Gartner. Global virtualisation penetration is on track to reach 20 per cent in 2009 from 12 per cent in 2008.
Gartner also estimated that revenue from hosted virtual desktops will more than triple from $74.1m (£51m) to $298.6m (£206m) in 2009, while revenue from server virtualisation management software will increase 42 per cent from $913.9m (£629m) in 2008 to $1.3bn (£1bn) in 2009.
Revenue from server virtualisation infrastructure, meanwhile, will grow 22.5 per cent from $917m (£631m) in 2008 to $1.1bn (£757m) in 2009.
Gartner analyst Alan Dayley explained that the main drivers for businesses are to cut costs, better utilise assets, and reduce management time and complexity.
"Server virtualisation management will be the primary source of growth in the virtualisation market as hypervisor software functionality - key to virtualising a server - rapidly moves to hardware," he added.
"Server virtualisation management technology, in particular, is designed to reduce total cost of ownership, reduce associated availability risk, and improve quality of service.
"In addition, building more manageability into infrastructure components provides technology suppliers with an additional source of revenue and a basis for competitive differentiation."
Gartner predicted that Microsoft will challenge VMware as the leader in the server virtualisation infrastructure market by 2013, but added that the server virtualisation management market is currently wide open.
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Do you agree?
IT departments can't lose sight of data centre management best practices as they move to virtualisation
Virtualisation makes it easy to deploy data centre systems at will, providing IT flexibility to quickly respond to the constantly changing demands of today's business. With virtualisation, administrators manage pooled resources across the enterprise, distributing resources dynamically where they're needed, as they're needed.
However, as the move towards the virtual data centre starts to gather momentum, IT departments need to put more focus on Information Security.
The promise of better use of resources, lower costs and potential reduction to both power costs and real estate is providing a compelling reason to move towards virtualisation and service oriented architecture. However, virtualisation poses real risk as it adds greater complexity, pulling together large numbers of applications and services into one consolidated data centre.
IT departments can't lose sight of data centre management best practices as they move to virtualisation. The impact of poor change and configuration management has even greater results in the virtual world than in the physical because of the greater interdependencies. Using configuration audit and control software that works within the virtualisation engine, enables real-time monitoring and assessment of the implications of configuration and change to highlight security risks and track conformance to internal and external policies.
Only with the right level of visibility across the data centre, can businesses truly feel confident in the potential of embracing a virtual world.
Yours sincerely,
Andrew Heather
General Manager, EMEA
Tripwire
www.tripwire.com
Posted by Andrew Heather, 23 Feb 2009