Enterprises are reducing their carbon footprint and IT investments via virtualization solutions

According to the report, the global virtualization market was estimated at US$13.9 billion globally in 2013 and is forecast to reach US$21.5 billion by 2018, growing at a CAGR of 9.2% between 2014 and 2018. Western Europe and North America are the largest markets for virtualisation solutions, with forecast revenues of US$6.4 billion and US$5.6 billion, respectively, in 2018. However, Central & Latin America and the Middle East & Africa are the fastest growing markets with CAGRs of 16.2% and 14.4%, respectively, between 2014 and 2018.

The virtualization vendor landscape is a healthy mix of established vendors, niche and vertical-specific solution providers, with the top ten vendors contributing a share of 48.1% to the total virtualization market size in 2013. VMware dominated the virtualization market with a market share of 25.3% in 2013, followed by Citrix and Microsoft with respective market shares of 9.7% and 5.8%.

Server virtualization technologies have highest priority

According to a Kable survey, the highest investment priority among enterprises is server virtualization which already has a penetration rate of 65%. Printing and paper usage management and storage virtualisation also score high on enterprises' investment priorities, with 62% and 55% of respondents having already implemented such technologies in their organisations. Next on the list of priorities are power management tools and desktop virtualisation, with penetration rates of 55% and 54%, respectively.

“With the mounting pressure on enterprises to reduce their carbon footprint and IT investments, virtualization solutions are becoming increasingly popular,” says Praveen Kumar Tripathi, analyst at Kable. The emergence of specialised virtualization technologies such as cross-platform virtualization, network convergence, nested virtualization and virtualization management is further fuelling the growth of the market.