IDC's Take on the Virtualization Market

IDC, known far and wide for tracking all things tech, released its first look at the virtualization market in the form of the Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker this week. It should come as no surprise that it found virtualization license shipments for the second quarter of 2008 increased 53 percent over the prior quarter but were up 72 percent over the same quarter last year.

As for how IDC does this, Brett Waldman, research analyst for system software, says the survey tracks usage not deployments. He adds: "Since all mainframes and virtually all x86 and RISC servers are shipping with a hypervisor, it's not right to track the installed base of the software."

Once again we see the attention starting to turn beyond virtualization itself and on to the management of all the virtual servers popping up all over the place:

Waldman said one pattern demonstrates the rapid commoditization of hypervisors, a trend that became obvious following Microsoft's entry into the market with Hyper-V, which it distributes for free with Windows Server 2008. The impact of Microsoft's joining the fray with its free offering resulted in software revenue relating to server virtualization increasing only 15 percent increase during Q2, as compared to 32 percent growth in Q1.

"Things are starting to become very competitive, with the hypervisor itself becoming very low to almost no-cost," he said. "The real interesting areas are going to be in the management of virtualization and how companies can manage their physical and virtual servers together."

David Strom took a look at the evolving virtualization market in Datamation six months ago. Microsoft has come on strong since then.