Analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC) has released details about its forthcoming forecast on the server virtualization market called: Server Virtualization Market Forecast and Analysis, 2009-2014
The forecast is based on 10 In-depth interviews with IT directors in the U.S. which provides qualitative data and is supplemented with 400 quantitative surveys with U.S. and regional based IT directors.
2010 will be the first year that more than half of all installed application instances will run inside a virtual machine, IDC predicts. Stating that virtualization is the ‘killer app’ for the datacenter and that it has changed IT operations for ever. Large virtualization customers should seriously consider investing in automation tools and converged hardware to achieve lower time to deployment and simplification of increasingly complex datacenter infrastructures.
Based on these surveys, IDC forecasts that:
"…more than 23% of all servers shipped in 2014 will be actively supporting virtual machine technology. In addition, more than 70% of all server workloads installed on new shipments in 2014 will reside in a virtual machine. More than $19 billion will be spent on server hardware in support of these applications, with shipments of virtualized servers growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14% — more than twice the rate of the overall server market from 2009 to 2014.
IDC expects that this robust growth in server virtualization will continue through 2014 as datacenter adoption is increasingly considered mainstream in mature economies and as organizations in emerging regions look for datacenter efficiencies while they rapidly increase their server investments over the period…"