Yankee on Oracle: “Explosive Growth”

The Yankee Group’s Third Annual Global Virtualization Survey has turned up some great data on vendor market share. I’ll mention just a few data points that I think are especially noteworthy. The survey points to some interesting shifts in the vendor landscape. One conclusion is that Oracle is poised for “explosive growth in application virtualization and virtual appliances”.

Yankee ties this prediction to the company’s recent acquisition of BEA. In addition, it sees other IT systems vendors as coming on strong. Combined, Oracle, HP and IBM account for about an 11 percent market share but this has nowhere to go but up. (IBM’s share at about 5 percent, by the way, includes both x86 and Power Series sales.)

Another data point that grabbed my attention is that market penetration of Xen-based solutions have jumped significantly since the last time Yankee did the survey and is now up to 17 percent. This includes a Citrix XenServer share of 11 percent plus another 6 percent from Novell, Red Hat and other open source suppliers. Yankee says “this represents the biggest market share jump for any virtualization hypervisor solution.”

Finally, a comment on VMware’s new challenges. The survey data showed major market share advances from some key strategic suppliers: Microsoft (26 percent and solidly in the number two position), Citrix, Oracle,  Parallels, Virtual Iron, and Sun. Laura DiDio, a Research Fellow with the Yankee Group involved in the effort (who also, I recently learned, happens to be a neighbor of mine in Blackstone Valley horse country) stressed to me that as a result of this market movement, VMware’s once healthy two year lead has now been whittled down to six to nine months.

Posted by Tom Valovic on 08/12/2008 at 12:49 PM