Virtualization sales shoot up to 67%

and SWsoft is the winner here.

Operating system virtualization software Virtuozzo from SWsoft is growing fastest among all vendors -- 98 percent -- in the hot overall market for virtualization technology, according to industry analyst firm IDC. The worldwide industry sales of virtualization software experienced a 67 percent growth rate from 2004 to 2005 – with revenues topping $560M.

According to IDC, the virtualization market is expected to grow to $15B worldwide by 2009. The proliferation of servers in the data center has led to increased complexity and costs. Virtualization helps to reverse this trend by dramatically reducing the need for adding physical servers and their associated capital, power, software and management costs.

"Our sales momentum is a reflection of our highly-efficient operating system-level Virtuozzo technology, along with its management capabilities for physical servers and virtual environments," said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of SWsoft. "We will enhance those with management and automation tools that will allow customers to further maximize the benefits gained through virtualized resources."

Virtualization Efficiency and Manageability By consolidating virtual environments on physical servers, IT managers can reduce hardware costs, while increasing server utilization rates. The ability to effectively manage and automate a growing catalog of virtual assets ensures that complexity is reduced and that virtualization delivers cost savings.

"Overall, IDC views virtual machines as a foundational technology to the dynamic IT," said John Humphreys, program director with IDC's Enterprise Platform Group. "Virtualization, which decouples the application from the underlying hardware, allows the customer to create service oriented infrastructure whereby they can begin to manage services and employ policy-based automation to manage and deliver the underlying infrastructure." (1)

The IDC report also showed virtualization implementations on Linux experienced the fastest growth from 2004 to 2005 continuing the trend from the previous year. That trend is expected to continue through 2009.

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