Gartner Says Worldwide Virtualisation Software Revenue to Increase 43 Per Cent in 2009
Announcement posted by Gartner 13 Feb 2009
Worldwide virtualisation software revenue will
increase 43 per cent from $1.9 billion in 2008 to $2.7 billion in 2009,
according to Gartner, Inc. Global virtualisation penetration is on pace to
reach 20 per cent in 2009 from 12 per cent in 2008. Its adoption within the IT
organisation is driven by the need to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO),
enhance the agility and speed of deployment of IT needs and minimise carbon
footprint.
Gartner’s definition of the virtualisation
market includes server virtualisation management, server virtualisation
infrastructure and hosted virtual desktops (HVDs)*. Gartner estimates that revenue
from HVDs will more than triple from $74.1 million to $298.6 million in 2009
while revenue from server virtualisation management software will increase 42
per cent from $913.9 million in 2008 to $1.3 billion in 2009. Revenue from
server virtualisation infrastructure will grow 22.5 per cent from $917 million
in 2008 to $1.1 billion in 2009.
“Virtualisation helps organisations to cut
costs, better utilise assets and reduce implementation and management time and
complexity, all of which are crucial in this economic environment,” said Alan
Dayley, research director at Gartner. “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. Server virtualisation management technology in particular is designed
to reduce TCO, 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.”
Although HVD is an emerging technology that
currently represents 11 per cent of the virtualisation software revenue market,
it will account for a growing proportion of corporate users through 2013. Virtual
desktop infrastructure feeds additional server virtualisation needs because the
users' desktop data will now need to be managed in a virtualised server
environment. Maturity and acceptance will result in a significant broadening of
the addressable user population by 2010 and an acceleration in deployments. Gartner
advises end-user organisations to define and optimise management processes for
HVDs as they did for traditional PCs. Although HVD images are centralised and
more standardised, the capabilities for managing them across their full
deployment life cycles remain incomplete. To remedy this, they should budget
for additional point-solution management capabilities.
“End-user organisations must build
cost and benefit financial models to fully understand the financial impact of
implementing HVDs, and make certain that cost and benefit exist as compared
with those for traditional PCs,” said Phil Dawson, research vice president at
Gartner. “There is a growing number of management providers, which represents
an opportunity for end-user pricing leverage, but no vendor offers a complete
set of server virtualisation management functionality. IT organisations will
have to undertake - or outsource - their own virtualisation management system
integration efforts or wait for better-integrated and robust toolsets.”
From a vendor perspective, by 2013, Microsoft
will challenge VMware as the dominant vendor in the server virtualisation
infrastructure market and will do very well in small and midsize businesses
(SMBs). The server virtualisation management market is currently wide open,
with more than 100 vendors supplying products that meet some of the
requirements in the management stack. As the management market matures,
virtualisation infrastructure vendors, the “Big Four” (BMC Software, CA, HP and
IBM/Tivoli) and other management vendors will build and acquire more virtualisation
management capabilities, thus consolidating the market. On the other hand, the HVD
vendor landscape is crowded, confusing, and full of opportunists.
Gartner recommends that vendors take advantage
during this disruptive period by introducing leading-edge management tools in
support of virtualisation initiatives and ensure that virtualisation-specific
management products can integrate within existing management frameworks. Mr
Dayley said: “The fast-growing server virtualisation management and HVD markets
are less consolidated, with scores of vendors trying to stake claim in the
market.”
Additional information is available in the
Gartner report "Dataquest Insight: Virtualization Market Size Driven by
Cost Reduction, Resource Utilization and Management Advantages." The report
is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=849725&subref=simplesearch.
*An HVD is a full, thick-client user environment
(operating system and applications) run as a virtual machine on a server and
accessed remotely through a window on a remote device.
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