Virtual machine software enjoys real hike

The worldwide virtual machine software (VMS) market grew to a value of US$560 million in 2005, according to new research.

IDC said that the growth represents a "robust" 67 percent hike over the previous year and tops the 63 percent year-over-year growth recorded in 2004.

"The growth in the dynamic VMS market will continue as organisations increasingly deploy VMS as a means of decoupling the application stack from the underlying hardware," said John Humphreys, research director for IDC's Enterprise Computing group.

"While we believe that VMS is a foundational technology to the creation of dynamic IT environments, the challenge is to get users to integrate virtualisation with legacy management tools and enhance management functionality to solve specific business issues."

EMC's VMware was identified as the top VMS vendor in 2005, with a market share of over 55 percent.

IDC believes that EMC's ability to support many operating environments concurrently on industry-standard systems, reinforced by partnerships or alliances with almost every leading hardware supplier, contributed to that performance.

According to IDC, industry-standard (x86-based) systems lead the market for VMS software. North American organisations purchased over half of all VMS products.

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