Research:Virtual Competition Heats Up

NEW YORK -- The 451 Group believes that competition in virtualization technology is heating up and has moved to the management layer. Thanks to open source projects, the hypervisor the software layer that enables physical machines to run multiple virtual machines – has become a commodity. As a result, hypervisor vendors have become virtualization management vendors and are now selling virtualization administration. These findings are contained in a report released today by New York-based The 451 Group, a technology-industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation.

"The number of companies jumping into the virtualization arena has exploded," said Rachel Chalmers, Senior Analyst for Enterprise Software at The 451 Group and author of the report. "Six companies represented VM management in our first major report on datacenter virtualization, published in December 2006. Less than 12 months later, in this report, we profile 50 privately held companies competing in exactly the same sector."

This report identifies 10 subsectors of virtualization management technology:

"Virtualization is the third-fastest-growing sector in IT buying, behind only storage and security," said Chalmers. "We believe Microsoft is the likeliest buyer, with potential interest in nine of the 10 subsectors – if only because its as-yet-unreleased hypervisor is lagging an estimated two years behind that of market leader VMware. Judicious acquisition could help the Windows giant catch up."

The 451 Group