Quoting from the IDC official announcement:
As virtualization goes mainstream and becomes an integral part of the IT infrastructure, there are increasing opportunities for IT services to help customers implement and support this expanding technology. According to recent research from IDC, the virtualization services market will grow from $5.5 billion in 2006 to $11.7 billion in 2011, as data center managers struggle to address power and cooling issues and the need for increased capacity.
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The market for services around volume servers (servers with an average selling price of less than $25,000) will experience tremendous growth between 2006 and 2011.
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Currently the largest services opportunities for the virtualization software vendors will be around software support and education and training. However, the IT consulting and Systems integration services are showing faster growth…
Considering this prediction it’s not surprising Glasshouse just acquired virtualization consulting firm RapidApp.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.