Abstract
This IDC study offers market sizing and anticipated trends highlighting
virtualized services' opportunity in the global market. IDC believes increases
in mainstream server virtualization will significantly enhance the market for
virtualization services in 2008. "For many organizations, the question is not
if they will do a global rollout of x86 server virtualization, but when and who
can provide them the service they need to make the rollout a success," said
Matt Healy, research manager of IDC' s Software and Hardware Support Services
program.
Where complexity and scale are the drivers in this context, systems vendors and
IT consulting providers stand to outpace virtualization software as the
delivery partner of choice. However, with this greater complexity,
virtualization software vendors could enhance their opportunities by building
integration teams and more aggressive partnering ecosystems. For IT education
providers, training IT managers on governance and decision making via
established methodologies and principles such as ITIL will rise in value as
decoupled applications and virtual servers demand highly skilled staff
oversight from planning through installation and ongoing organic growth. For
CEOs, virtualization offers undeniable attractions: economical server
consolidation, dynamic agile IT, and highly responsive point solutions. At the
same time, it also presents systemwide risks if done without care and
expertise, both areas that services providers and enterprise IT staff must
approach with attention to governance and policies. In particular, continuity
planning presents a shift from diagnosis of a single-server failure of the
pre-virtualization datacenter to avoidance of systemwide cascade failure.
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