BANGALORE, INDIA: While the market is far from being stable and mature, the virtualization ecosystem has grown to accommodate the many needs of the virtual environment.

Globally, server virtualization has become a mainstream technology, particularly in large organizations with over $1 billion in revenues and in the IT intensive BFSI sectors, across revenue bands.

A number of key market trends point towards the technology becoming accessible to a broader demographic over the course of the next few years. This is true for India as well.

Virtualization adoption in India, both on the server and the end point (desktop) side has been restricted largely to the IT intensive sectors, IT/ITES, telecom, and BFSI, apart from very large enterprises. However, this could change over the next few years.

All the major vendors have a substantial commercial presence in India. The skill availability is rapidly growing, particularly with many IT services companies executing projects with a significant virtualization component, the virtualization solution vendors maintaining fairly large development teams in India, and the IT services companies increasingly targeting the domestic market.

Datamonitor believes that the current global economic situation would accelerate the adoption of both server and desktop virtualization.

About server virtualization, companies would be eager to avoid the capital expenses involved in hardware refreshes, and virtualization software prices have also reduced due to competitive pressures. The virtualization ecosystem (and most importantly the management toolset) and interoperability has also improved. Therefore the constraints on the supply side are rapidly being mitigated.

About desktop virtualization, the target markets have traditionally been, and we believe would remain, the retail banking and the IT/ITES sectors. Many companies are factoring in a multi-year slump in the planning process, and when the desktop hardware refreshes come up, IT organizations are going to think hard about whether all the expensive PCs are really necessary. The virtualization ecosystem is offering many point solutions, and enhanced management capabilities.

At the virtualization platform layer, the situation was fairly stable and predictable until recently. VMWare was the largest vendor by a mile, with the ESX Server platform, and a host of point solutions.

 

However, In August 2007, Citrix, a veteran in the application delivery market, acquired XenSource. XenSource managed the commercial presence of Xen, an open source server virtualization platform.

Soon after, Microsoft released its Hyper-V virtualization platform. Microsoft and Citrix have been partners for two decades, and collectively the two vendors pose a serious challenge to VMWare.