Messaging Virtualization Market Trends Report

By Stephanie Jordan
in

Earlier this year, Osterman Research conducted a survey focused on the North American market for virtualization among organizations in the mid-sized (100–1,000 email users) and enterprise markets (>1,000 email users). The report, Messaging Virtualization Market Trends, 2008-2011, took a look at current and future trends in the use of virtualization for various messaging-related applications.

The report found that the two leading reasons that organizations cite for deploying virtualization technology are to reduce hardware costs and to improve disaster recovery/business continuity. Other important reasons to deploy virtualization, cited by roughly three in five organizations as a driver or major driver, are optimizing the IT infrastructure, to make it easier to add additional capacity to existing services and to reduce the cost of IT labor.

Osterman found that IT decision-makers’ knowledge about virtualization has a long way to go: 34 percent of these decision makers have, at best, only a modest understanding of how virtualization could be used for email server applications, while 37 percent have this level of knowledge about how virtualization could be used for storage systems. Similarly, nearly two-thirds of IT decision-makers are no more than modestly aware of the existence of commercial or open-source virtual appliances for messaging functions.

The report also notes that most decision makers or influencers in IT departments are not familiar with many vendors of virtualization technologies. For example, the vast majority of IT decision makers are familiar only with vendors like VMware, Citrix, IBM, Microsoft and a few others.

For more on the report go to: www.ostermanresearch.com.

Published November 17, 2008