Worldwide Virtual Machine Software 2004 Vendor Shares: Industry-Standard Architectures Come to the Forefront

This IDC study provides a top-down sizing of the virtual machine software (VMS) market (measured by revenue) and vendor shares in 2004. The VMS market grew at a robust 62.6% from 2003 to 2004, which topped the 48% growth recorded from 2002 to 2003. This growth was led by Windows and mainframes in terms of net new dollars. Windows now captures 37.6% of the revenue in the market. By comparison, mainframes captured 26% of the market total. North America and Western Europe were responsible for the largest amount of VMS revenue. The Asia/Pacific and rest of the world (ROW) regions produced the greatest growth contributions.

"The growth of the VMS market was surprisingly healthy during 2004," said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of System Software at IDC. "Windows and mainframes provided the largest stream of revenue."