Small and medium-sized business software sales remain strong in the face of the global economic downturn. A closer look at the types of software packages that are being sold reveals that virtualization has attracted strong interest, in no doubt thanks to its promise to reduce costs over the long term. Prior to the current recession, the virtualization market had been pegged by industry watchers to crack $1.8 billion USD in sales, more than doubling its 2006 levels . Interestingly enough, those estimates proved to be accurate, and the virtualization adoption rate has managed to increase at a rate that can't be ignored .
35% of all servers purchased in Europe in 2007 were virtualised in 2008 . More than half of all European server administrators implemented virtualization plans that same year, with half of those remaining planning to follow suit the next 18 months.
In the United States, similar adoption rates were seen amongst small and medium-sized businesses, and HP and Dell have implemented special virtualization deployment plans aimed at facilitating its adoption by small and medium-sized businesses, indicating their level of confidence in the emerging market.
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On a more general scale, 12% of global businesses employed some form of virtualization in 2008, with this figure predicted to rise to 20% in 2009. Key drivers for this growing interest continue to be:
• Cost reduction
• Simplification of management
• Increased sensitivity to energy expenses and environmental impact related to expanding server farms.