GEC NEWS WIREThe worldwide x86 server virtualization market is expected to reach $5.6 billion in 2016, an increase of 5.7 percent from 2015, according to Gartner, Inc. Despite the overall market increase, new software licenses have declined for the first time since this market became mainstream more than a decade ago. Growth is now being driven by maintenance revenue, which indicates a rapidly maturing software market segment.
“The market has matured rapidly over the last few years, with many organizations having server virtualization rates that exceed 75 percent, illustrating the high level of penetration, ” said Michael Warrilow, Research Director at Gartner.
The market remains dominated by VMware, however, Microsoft has worked its way in as a mainstream contender for enterprise use. Gartner analysts believe that the impact of new computing styles and approaches will be increasingly significant for this market. This includes OS container-based virtualization and cloud computing.
According to Gartner, usage of server virtualization among organizations with larger IT budgets remained stable during 2014 and 2015. It continues to be an important and heavily used technology for these businesses, but this market segment is approaching saturation. In contrast, organizations with smaller IT budgets expect a further decline in usage through to at least 2017. This is causing an overall decline in new spending for on-premises server virtualization.
Gartner believes that organizations are increasing their usage of “physicalization,” choosing to run servers without virtualization software.
