Virtualisation software mkt to touch $1.35bln by 2010

New Delhi, Mar 31 (UNI) Virtualisation software and services market in the Asia Pacific region are growing at an estimated CAGR of 42 per cent and is expected to reach 1.35 billion dollars by 2010, a Springboard Research study shows.

Virtualisation services will form the major portion of the market as organisations are expected to spend two to three times more on services than on software.

According to the study, 50 per cent of the respondents of the study want to deploy virtualisation solutions over the next 18-24 months to address issues like low system capacity utilisation, poor performance and other challenges associated with managing growing IT infrastructure.

The respondents of the survey are Chief Information Officers from large and mid-sized enterprises in Australia, China, India and Singapore.

''Our research indicates that virtualisation, at least at the server level, is becoming an imperative and that a growing number of companies will implement virtualisation at the server level in 2008,'' said Springboard Research Vice President (Software Research) Michael Barnes.

The complex nature of engagements with vendors and System Integrators, while implementing virtualisation solutions is a prime reason for virtualisation services taking a larger share of the market, he added.

''There is clearly a need for more customer education on the benefits of virtualisation, followed by education on different approaches to successfully incorporate virtualisation into the IT environment,'' said company, Senior Analyst, Ravi Shekhar Pandey.

Virtualisation software allows a single host computer to create and run one or more virtual environments.

It is most often used to emulate a complete computer system in order to allow a guest operating system to be run, for example allowing Linux to run as a guest on top of a PC that is natively running a Microsoft Windows operating system.

On the software side, VMWare is the Asia Pacific virtualisation market leader with an estimated 70 per cent market share, while Microsoft, Parallels, Virtual Iron and XenSource are other players with significant presence.

The virtualisation services market is dominated by several key players including IBM, HP, Dell and Sun.

Australia and Korea lead the virtualisation marketplace in Asia Pacific due to their well-built infrastructure, while Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and India are high growth potential markets.

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