It looks like Microsoft is slowing eating away at VMware’s dominance in the virtualization space. In this Wall Street Journal article, it’s noted that, in 2008, IDC trackers estimated that Hyper-V was in use on 20.3% of new virtualized systems. Last year, this figure was 27.6%. At the same time, VMware’s market share dropped from 65.4% in 2008 to 56.8% last year.
However, before jumping to conclusions, understand that there are two possible reasons for this change in market share:
- Microsoft really could be eating VMware’s lunch, with customers choosing to drop VMware in favor of Microsoft.
- More likely, newer customers have come aboard that have opted for Hyper-V over VMware or an organization has chosen to deploy Hyper-V alongside their existing vSphere environments. Either scenario could result in the market figures described.
We’ll see a lot of these kinds of statistics over time. If possible, try to dig a bit deeper to see if the existing market has changed or if the market has simply grown with new players skewing the odds.