This IDC study examines the clustering and availability software (CLAS) market for the 2004–2006 period. The worldwide market size is provided for 2006, along with trends in the marketplace from 2004 to 2006. It presents a vendor competitive analysis and revenue shares of the leading CLAS vendors. This study also provides brief profiles of the top vendors and identifies the characteristics that established and new vendors will need to be successful in the future.

"Traditional failover clustering software is being joined by a new style of CLAS that aims at moving workloads more quickly and easily, using different technical approaches to reach the same end: hosting of workloads on alternate resources," said Jean S. Bozman, research vice president in IDC's Enterprise Virtualization Group. "Much of this new software does not require a scripting process at all. Rather, the functionality leverages workload-balancing techniques, or a number of grid- and utility-computing approaches to the scheduling of tasks, to route workloads to alternate resources but to accomplish that goal in new ways."