Psychics, Um, Analysts Predict Virtualization Will Impact IT Budgets

A couple of recent fee-for-view reports stated IT spending on virtualization will ... go up over the next three years. Perhaps we will need to spend money to save money in the long run. Recent reports, one from Saugatuck Technology (reported here) and a second from Dublin-based ResarchAndMarkets (link here) are predicting big spends on the virtualization front. The Saugatuck brief states that over the next three-odd years, server virtualization will have the single largest impact on budgets for IT hardware and support with Cisco, VMware, and Citrix dominating all new virtualization deployments. I'm not sure I'd drop $795 to dig into the details on this one. Nor would I pay EUR 851.00 ($1,252) to get the same report (yup, re-marketed from Saugatuck) from the Irish firm. So I guess this actually counts as one report predicting VM spending will increase.

I'm not disparaging analysts' reports; heck, I've written a few myself. All kidding aside, I'm sure there is a bunch of good info and insight in the report. But ... are there any IT pros out there that doubt virtualization will be taking a big bite out of everyone's budgets through 2010?

How many of us will be buying servers with non-VM enabled chipsets? The numbers for "virtualization" hardware and software (especially when every version of W2K8 can bundle a hypervisor!) will be skewed toward "virtualization" HW and SW because everything is being branded or re-branded as pro-virtualization. Frankly, it is getting difficult to read through any enterprise IT marketing materials without tripping over VM'ed or other virt tags in the copy. Intel and AMD are looking toward virutalization capabilities on the desktop. Even Apple has finally modified its licensing agreements to support Mac OS in hosted environments. VMware, VirtualIron, Xen/Citrix, SWSoft/Parallels, Oracle... How many enterprise-class hypervisors will we have when this all shakes out?

I guess we???ve tipped, folks. Long live the virtualized world. Until the next big thing. Be sure to plan your budgets accordingly.