2008: Tech outsiders to start using the term "Virtualization"

Well my wife and the rest of my extended family (here is Holland and India) already uses it! Thats what WBJournal thinks:

Research firm IDC predicts that spending on virtualization technology will surpass $15 billion worldwide in three years. More than double what it was in 2006.

And competitors and colleagues scattered throughout the region have big expectation for the technology in 2008. That's because the area is home to a number of other smaller companies that also specialize in virtualization technology.

"If you look at 2007, virtualization really started to get on people's radar screens, and some of that has to do with VMware," said Susan Davis, vice president of Marlborough-based virtualization firm Egenera. "But what has really been driving it is the recognition by everything from developers to large corporations that computing has become incredibly inefficient and this is a way to change that."

A number of other companies are already integrating virtualization technology into their products. Framingham-based server firm Netezza, for example, uses the technology in some of its products. Scali Inc. in Marlborough specializes in a form of virtualization known as clustering.

"Certainly from the vendor landscape there are more and more companies using it for a myriad of issues," Davis said. "And from a customer's perspective it represents a lot of opportunity where the technology can address a lot of problems they face."

The virtualization movement - and the growth enjoyed by companies specializing in it, builds on the recent successes of other MetroWest-area companies with products specialized in re-tasking the ways large organizations use data.

Its going to be an exciting year, thats for sure. I am interviewing PanoLogic today and we'll carry on this discussion there as well. I will post the written Q&A the minute I have them. I plan to talk to Dione , VP and Aly, CTO this week.

We will also start doing the recaps, starting by talking to our great friend, Ratmir, a really cool entrepreneur who is the CEO of Veeam , we did chat up last year when Veeam was sprouting up, we want to see how our friends are doing all the time.

So you get it, we want to walk with the "then startups, now established" leaders to watch where they are going. We don't just make friends, we want to keep them for life!

Oh..here's the link to WBjournal.