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Industry Moves: Dan Kusnetzky To Join The 451 Group

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The 451 Group has appointed Dan Kusnetzky, 25-year veteran analyst and leader of ZDNet’s Virtually Speaking blog, to head up its research operations. As Vice President, Research Operations, Mr. Kusnetzky will initially accelerate The 451 Group’s cloud computing and virtualization practices, and will direct overall 451 coverage.

Dan Kusnetzky brings The 451 Group more than three decades of industry experience. Before joining the senior team of The 451 Group, Kusnetzky was Principal Analyst at KG LLC. Prior to that, he was Executive Vice President of Corporate and Marketing Strategy for Open-Xchange, a software company that provides open-source collaborative solutions.

Kusnetzky also spent 12 years at International Data Corporation (IDC), four of them as Vice President of System Software Research. During this time, he led an extended team of 16 analysts and created an industry-leading research practice based on both quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Prior to that, Kusnetzky spent 16 years with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), where he was responsible for program and product management and marketing in the areas of client software, server software, and clustered and networked systems, and he had the responsibility of being the Intel/UNIX Business Manager.

IDC: Virtual Server Management Software Revenues to Reach $2.3 Billion in 2013 Thanks To Large-Scale Deployments

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The ramp up of large-scale virtual server implementations around the world will drive tremendous demand for a newly defined competitive market – virtual server management software – for distributed systems (principally Windows, Unix, and Linux platforms), according to new research from IDC.

IDC says the worldwide distributed virtual server management software market had revenues of $871 million in 2008 and will approach $2.3 billion in 2013; a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.3% over the forecast period.

Additional findings from IDC’s research include the following:

  • Many customers have not yet integrated virtual and physical resource management processes or aligned virtual server management activities with IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
  • Over the next five years, the distributed virtual server management software market will evolve and mature, creating significant opportunities for new competitors.
  • A strong spirit of “coopetition” will permeate this market over the next several years.

This study, Worldwide Distributed Virtual Server Management Software 2009-2013 Forecast: A First Look (IDC #217485), presents IDC’s preliminary top-down sizing of the worldwide distributed virtual server management software market in 2008 and a forecast of worldwide growth in this market for 2009-2013. This analysis is IDC’s first sizing and forecast for this emerging competitive market. Only top-line total market data is shown in this study. The study specifically excludes software related to mainframe, storage, network, or desktop virtualization management. Vendor market share data, as well as data for geographic regions, will be provided in subsequent IDC publications.

The 451 Group Snaps Up Research Firm Moss Creek Capital

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The 451 Group has acquired independent equity-research firm Moss Creek Capital in order to expand its services for the professional investment community. Dallas-based Moss Creek provides investment research on publicly traded software companies, offering actionable insight gleaned from conversations with end users, key players in the software distribution channel and company executives. Moss Creek principal Gregg Speicher will remain with the acquired firm.

The acquisition expands the coverage and financial expertise of The 451 Group, an independent analyst firm that covers emerging technologies within the enterprise IT industry.

“The addition of Moss Creek will accelerate our efforts to explain to investors how disruptive technologies will affect large and small public companies,” said Martin V. McCarthy, CEO of The 451 Group. “With major forces such as cloud computing gathering on the horizon, we believe that investors are hungry for deep insight into which companies are going to be winners and losers in the resulting market. We will continue to look for opportunities to expand our firm, and we expect to complete additional acquisitions this year.”

Hyper9 Introduces H9Labs

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Hyper9 announced on Wednesday the creation of H9Labs, an experimental division of Hyper9 that will research, develop and provide VI administrators with an opportunity to experience and evaluate new and emerging innovations and technologies.

H9Labs is unique because it relies on the community of VI administrators for input on the capabilities they need most to effectively do their job, and user feedback will be crucial to help improve these tools before they attain general availability status.

H9Labs recently announced VI administrator tools developed by H9Labs’s own Andrew Kutz, a well known developer in the VMware community who was recently named a vExpert by VMware.

H9Labs GuessMyOS plug-in replaces generic VM icons in the VI3 client inventory tree with OS-specific icons for both Windows and Linux guest and Virtualization Manager Mobile Beta, which allows the user to manage and monitor their virtual infrastructure from their favorite mobile device. The free H9Labs PowerShell Cmdlts, such as the Out-DataSet cmdlet, is an extremely useful and needed cmdlet as indicated by the VI administrator community. VI admins use it to pipe any type of data that can be formatted with the built-in cmdlet, Format-Table, into a typed Microsoft .NET System.Data.DataSet.

Gartner: Worldwide Virtualization Software Revenue Will Increase 43% in 2009

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Worldwide virtualization software revenue will increase 43 per cent from $1.9 billion in 2008 to $2.7 billion in 2009, according to Gartner. Global virtualization penetration is on pace to reach 20 per cent in 2009 from 12 per cent in 2008. Its adoption within the IT organization is driven by the need to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO), enhance the agility and speed of deployment of IT needs and minimize carbon footprint.

Gartner’s definition of the virtualisation market includes server virtualization management, server virtualization infrastructure and hosted virtual desktops (HVDs). Gartner estimates that revenue from HVDs will more than triple from $74.1 million to $298.6 million in 2009 while revenue from server virtualization management software will increase 42 per cent from $913.9 million in 2008 to $1.3 billion in 2009. Revenue from server virtualization infrastructure will grow 22.5 per cent from $917 million in 2008 to $1.1 billion in 2009.

“Virtualization helps organizations to cut costs, better utilize assets and reduce implementation and management time and complexity, all of which are crucial in this economic environment,” said Alan Dayley, research director at Gartner. “Server virtualization management will be the primary source of growth in the virtualization market as hypervisor software functionality – key to virtualizing a server – rapidly moves to hardware. Server virtualization management technology in particular is designed to reduce TCO, reduce associated availability risk, and improve quality of service. In addition, building more manageability into infrastructure components provides technology suppliers with an additional source of revenue and a basis for competitive differentiation.”

“Although HVD is an emerging technology that currently represents 11 per cent of the virtualization software revenue market, it will account for a growing proportion of corporate users through 2013. Virtual desktop infrastructure feeds additional server virtualization needs because the users’ desktop data will now need to be managed in a virtualized server environment. Maturity and acceptance will result in a significant broadening of the addressable user population by 2010 and an acceleration in deployments. Gartner advises end-user organizations to define and optimize management processes for HVDs as they did for traditional PCs. Although HVD images are centralized and more standardized, the capabilities for managing them across their full deployment life cycles remain incomplete. To remedy this, they should budget for additional point-solution management capabilities.

“End-user organizations must build cost and benefit financial models to fully understand the financial impact of implementing HVDs, and make certain that cost and benefit exist as compared with those for traditional PCs,” said Phil Dawson, research vice president at Gartner. “There is a growing number of management providers, which represents an opportunity for end-user pricing leverage, but no vendor offers a complete set of server virtualization management functionality. IT organizations will have to undertake – or outsource – their own virtualization management system integration efforts or wait for better-integrated and robust toolsets.”

“From a vendor perspective, by 2013, Microsoft will challenge VMware as the dominant vendor in the server virtualization infrastructure market and will do very well in small and midsize businesses (SMBs). The server virtualization management market is currently wide open, with more than 100 vendors supplying products that meet some of the requirements in the management stack. As the management market matures, virtualization infrastructure vendors, the “Big Four” (BMC Software, CA, HP and IBM/Tivoli) and other management vendors will build and acquire more virtualization management capabilities, thus consolidating the market. On the other hand, the HVD vendor landscape is crowded, confusing, and full of opportunists.

Gartner recommends that vendors take advantage during this disruptive period by introducing leading-edge management tools in support of virtualization initiatives and ensure that virtualization-specific management products can integrate within existing management frameworks. Mr Dayley said: “The fast-growing server virtualization management and HVD markets are less consolidated, with scores of vendors trying to stake claim in the market.”