This IDC study provides a top-down sizing of the virtual machine software market in 2005 and a 2006–2010 forecast for this market. Historical and forecast revenue data is shown for the total worldwide market and by geographic region and operating environment. This study does not contain vendor-specific revenue, market shares, or vendor profiles, all of which will be published in a separate study in 3Q06.

"The long-term outlook for server virtualization continues to be very positive because the technology is becoming a foundation for the dynamic enterprise," said John Humphreys, program director, Enterprise Virtualization Software. "The main challenge for vendors in this space is to continue to add use cases for the technology both inside and outside the datacenter."