This IDC study (which is a translation of the Japanese report IDC #J8370101) presents the analysis of the Japan virtualization market and HA clustering software market by operating environment and vendor in 2006. It also provides market forecasts from 2007 to 2011.

In the area of virtualization software, the Japan virtual machine software market registered extremely high growth in 2006, increasing 64.9% year-on-year to 5.83 billion yen. The Japan virtual user interface software market grew 18.0% year-on-year to 10.4 billion yen in 2006. The Japan HA clustering software market posted a year-on-year increase of 11.0% to 14.911 billion yen in 2006. "The virtualization software market has concluded its testing and development phase to move into actual implementation. Users' growing need for server consolidation through virtualization technology and security enhancements for client PCs will further drive the growth in this market. Furthermore, HA clustering software will enable users to shift from traditional local site failovers to high value-added solutions as a result of disaster recovery measures implemented among datacenters," observes Mitsuhiro Iriya, research analyst, Software, IDC Japan.