Steven Jones over at the Wall Street Journal had an interesting article entitled “Microsoft Quietly Gains Share in Virtualization.” Here’s a recap from WSJ:
Microsoft quietly gains share in virtualization. Microsoft is the second-largest provider of virtualization software, behind VMware Inc., and it is gaining market share, reports the WSJ’s Steven D. Jones. Last year, Microsoft HyperV was installed on 27.6% of new computer servers put into service, up from 20.3% in 2008, according to IDC. Microsoft’s virtualization business, which is recognizing the most growth in emerging markets and smaller companies in developed markets, is key to the company gaining a larger foothold in cloud-management software. Once a company adopts virtualization “the data center and all the capital [and effort] it took to build and staff, that can be done by software too. That’s really at the heart of the Microsoft strategy now,” Gartner Inc. analyst Chris Wolf tells the WSJ.
(By the way – Microsoft spells this “Hyper-V” while the article refers to it as “HyperV”.)
IDC noted that VMware continues to dominate the market in terms of market share with 56.8% – but that is down from 65.4% in 2008. What’s particularly interesting to me is that we’re seeing an even faster ramp for Hyper-V in our core midrange market as companies with between 50 and 5000 employees seem to be adopting Hyper-V faster than the Fortune 500 data centers (although we see evidence of Fortune 500 departmental Hyper-V adoption growing at a fast clip.)
Unitrends of course has a free fully-functional virtual appliance (Unitrends Enterprise Backup(TM)) that works on Hyper-V and VMware vSphere – so we’re not disinterested third-parties. About 40% of our tens of thousands of downloads have been for Hyper-V.
Microsoft’s position was summarized by Kevin Turner, Microsoft COO: “We’re now in a situation where we have a very, very strong market share. We’re growing every quarter, and the dominant guy is losing every quarter as it relates to virtualization.”
What do you think? Do you think that Microsoft Hyper-V going to eventually have superior market share when compared to VMware vSphere?