Virtualisation software revenue will increase by 55 per cent in 2009, according to a report by Gartner.
The analyst firm has predicted revenue in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) will increase from 330 million (294 million) in 2008 to 512 million in 2009, with the UK being one of the largest benefactors accounting for 23 per cent of the market.
Rene Millman, senior research analyst at Gartner, said: "The EMEA market is expected to be a significant driver of worldwide growth. Echoing global drivers of virtualisation software, the EMEA market growth will be led by cost reduction, resource utilisation and management advantages."
Gartner has defined the virtualisation market as including server virtualisation management, server virtualisation infrastructure and hosted virutal desktops (HVD) - operating system and applications run as a virtual machine on a server and accessed remotely through a window on a remote device.
The largest growth is expected in the server virtualisation management market, which Gartner said will increase by 54.3 per cent reaching 244.8 million in 2009. The HVD software market had reached more than 12 million in 2008 and is expected to grow 335.7 per cent to 56.2 million in 2009 which Gartner claim is "driven by corporate adoption."
Ewen Anderson, director for the independent consultancy Centralis, said: "Feedback from Centralis customers makes it clear that virtualisation, having proven itself in the datacentre for production use, is now moving into the realms of applications and desktops. Projects to tackle this, even in the current economic climate, are high on the agendas of most of our customers."
"The organisations that get it right can expect to see significant increases in flexibility and decreases in operational cost as they move to streaming and provisioning from gold images of applications and desktops."
