Gartner predicts virtualisation to snowball

Worldwide virtualisation software revenue will increase 43 per cent from US$1.9bn last year to US$2.7bn 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 US$74.1m to US$298.6m in 2009, while revenue from server virtualisation management software will increase 42 per cent from US$913.9m in 2008 to US$1.3bn in 2009.

Revenue from server virtualisation infrastructure, meanwhile, will grow 22.5 per cent from US$917m in 2008 to US$1.1bn 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.