Virtualization 'cornerstone technology' post-recession: IDC

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 28 October 2009 07:04

IT Industry - Market

Eastwood’s colleague, Michelle Bailey, research VP of datacenter at IDC, said that the server virtualization maturity emerging in the market signals changing behaviours and buying intentions, and she maintains that "server virtualization has forever changed how customers manage their datacenters."

According to said Bailey, ‘virtualization first’ is now the default approach for new server deployments at most enterprise IT organizations and is “quickly becoming the foundational platform for cloud computing initiatives among service providers.
 
“Additionally, growth in emerging regions is accelerating as the economic downturn limits the ability of organizations to raise capital,” Bailey says, and forecasts that the next phase in virtualization will require a “reinvention of IT policies and procedures and continued adoption of automation tools will be key as virtual machine densities rise and customers find themselves facing virtual server sprawl issues."

According to IDC’s report, Hewlett-Packard held onto the number one spot for worldwide new server shipments virtualized with 36 percent market share, although its shipments declined 18 percent year over year in 2Q09 but grew one percent sequentially.

IDC also says that Dell continues to distance itself from the remainder of the field as the number two vendor with its market share growing 9 percent over 1Q09, with its “relatively strong performance” driven by growth of Intel-based x86 servers in a weak market.

IBM remained in the third position with 15 percent market share, achieving 14 percent sequential growth driven by a “solid performance” from its converged System p and x86-based servers.

IDC says that VMware continues to hold the number one (VMware ESX) and number two (VMware Server) virtualization platforms despite revenues declining 22 percent year over year, which it says was slightly more than the decline of 21 percent in total x86 virtualization licenses.

And, according to IDC, Microsoft saw its virtualization license shipments decline 16 percent year over year, “due to the continued depreciation of Virtual Server 2005.”