This IDC study offers market sizing and anticipated trends highlighting virtualized services' opportunity in the global market. IDC believes increases in mainstream server virtualization will significantly enhance the market for virtualization services in 2008. "For many organizations, the question is not if they will do a global rollout of x86 server virtualization, but when and who can provide them the service they need to make the rollout a success," said Matt Healy, research manager of IDC's Software and Hardware Support Services program.

Where complexity and scale are the drivers in this context, systems vendors and IT consulting providers stand to outpace virtualization software as the delivery partner of choice. However, with this greater complexity, virtualization software vendors could enhance their opportunities by building integration teams and more aggressive partnering ecosystems. For IT education providers, training IT managers on governance and decision making via established methodologies and principles such as ITIL will rise in value as decoupled applications and virtual servers demand highly skilled staff oversight from planning through installation and ongoing organic growth. For CEOs, virtualization offers undeniable attractions: economical server consolidation, dynamic agile IT, and highly responsive point solutions. At the same time, it also presents systemwide risks if done without care and expertise, both areas that services providers and enterprise IT staff must approach with attention to governance and policies. In particular, continuity planning presents a shift from diagnosis of a single-server failure of the pre-virtualization datacenter to avoidance of systemwide cascade failure.