Virtualisation heads for the mainstream

Virtualisation is rapidly heading for the corporate IT mainstream as new IDC research predicts that the virtualisation services market will grow from US$5.5bn in 2006 to US$11.7bn in 2011.

"The majority of the services opportunity lies in supporting customers' initial implementations of virtualisation," said Matt Healey, senior research analyst for software and hardware support services at IDC.

"However, over the next several years IT consulting and systems integration will begin to become the dominant opportunity as the technology becomes much more mainstream."

The analyst firm expects that the demand for IT consulting and systems integration will accelerate as the technology matures.

IT consulting will eventually assist customers in determining how virtualisation fits into the overall IT portfolio and its impact on the business.

The IDC report claimed that the market for services around volume servers with an average selling price of less than $25,000 will experience "tremendous growth" between 2006 and 2011.

This is being driven by recent developments that enable customers to virtualise x86/x64 servers.

The study noted that the market for virtualisation services is currently nascent in comparison to the overall market for IT services.

However, as the market evolves, services providers will need to be able to demonstrate virtualisation capabilities to be considered for larger services engagements.

According to the research, the largest services opportunities for the virtualisation software vendors will be around software support, education and training. However, the IT consulting and systems integration services are showing faster growth.