This IDC study provides a top-down sizing of the virtual machine software market in 2008 and a 2009–2013 forecast for this market. Historical and forecast revenue data is shown for the total worldwide market and by operating environment. This study does not contain vendor-specific revenue, geographic region segmentation, market shares, or vendor profiles, all of which will be published in separate studies during 2009.
According to Gary Chen, IDC research manager, Enterprise Virtualization Software, "Virtual machine software has not been entirely immune to the current economic situation as customers are buying less physical servers and reluctant to engage in capital expenditures. However, virtual machine software has fared better than most other IT areas and will rebound quickly as the market momentum caused by outstanding, proven cost savings and promising future functionality will be too much to stop."