Gartner Analyst Tom Bittman announced 5 virtualization trends to watch in 2012:
1) Competitive Choices Mature
2) Second Sourcing Grows
3) Pricing Models in Flux
4) Penetration and Saturation
5) Cloud Service Providers Are Placing Bets
What these mean is the market is maturing and businesses as well as cloud providers have more choices. More companies are working with Hyper-V than in the past and Open Source Vitualization is having more success in larger organizations as well as leading in the larger cloud providers such as Amazon and Rackspace. The cloud service providers are needing to make big bets as to if they want to invest more in the mainstream corporate virtualization providers VMWare and Microsoft or does it make more sense to stay with lower cost customized open source virtualization.
Larger corporations are looking to have options so they are not locked in with one virtualization provider and the proliferation and maturing of the virtualization market is adding price pressure as well as creating a changing pricing model.
Virtualization and the cloud are here to stay and will continue to penetrate and saturate. We are living in interesting times.
Source: ZDNet “Gartner lists top 5 server virtualization trends for 2012” by Paula Rooney
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/virtualization/gartner-lists-top-5-server-virtualization-trends-for-2012/4760