Virtual Machine Software Market Jumps 67% in 2005

The Virtual Machine Software market has expanded to a value of $560 million in 2005. The milestone is unprecedented and marks a 67% growth compared to the previous year. Also, the 67% market growth represents a 4% increase over the year-to-year growth of 2004, just 63%.

"The growth in the dynamic VMS market will continue as organizations increasingly deploy VMS as a means of decoupling the application stack from the underlying hardware," said John Humphreys, research director for IDC's Enterprise Computing group. "While we believe VMS is a foundational technology to the creation of dynamic IT environments, the challenge going forward is to get users to integrate virtualization with legacy management tools and enhance management functionality to solve specific business issues."

The conclusions of a study put together by IDC indicate that EMC/VMware owns a 55% of the Virtual Machine Software market. Also, it seems that Linux enjoyed the best VMS market performance in 2005, while in excess of half of the VMS products were sold exclusively on the north American market.