Saugatuck predicts Cisco, VMware and Citrix will dominate the virtualization market within 2010

Saugatuck Technologies just released a study which pushes some odd predictions:

  • Through 2010, all facets of IT Virtualization will see substantial enhancements in functionality and performance; however the most significant enhancements will be in microprocessor, hypervisor and operating system function for Server Virtualization.
  • Through 2010, Server Virtualization will have the single largest impact on budgets for IT hardware and support. The second largest impact will be network virtualization.
  • Through 2010, three vendors — Cisco, VMware and XenSource (now Citrix) — will dominate IT Virtualization, accounting for 60 percent of all new virtualization deployments.

While the first one is pretty generic (it includes every part of the computing stack) and definitively expected (it’s unlikely there will be no technical improvements in the next 3 years), the last one is pretty hard to decode.

Saugatuck’s analysts put on the same level two companies busy in the hardware virtualization market (VMware and Citrix) and one working in the today-called network virtualization (Cisco). So there are two chances: or this report is suggesting that Cisco will become a hardware virtualization player very soon (and succeed within 3 years), or this report is using a very arguable categorization model.

On top of that Microsoft is not present. Redmond guys may be wondering if the presence of Hyper-V in every single copy of Windows Server 2008 on the planet has been considered or not.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.