Virtualisation competition should increase as market opens up

The virtualisation market should expand away from being dominated by a few players with fairly rigid pricing befitting resellers looking to get involved with the market.

But the success of any channel expansion will involve both the vendor and distribution communities, according to research from CompuBase.

The EMEA channel analyst house has surveyed the current market and concluded it is dominated by just a handful of large to mid sized vendors but competition is expected to increase.

“Today, the main players act more like an oligopolistic environment: a few players and to a certain extent rigid prices. But as we mentioned, the market is full of expansion, there is still a lot of potential and there is still a lot more to come,” stated the study on Virtualisation software resellers in EMEA.

CompuBase estimates that there are up to 20,000 resellers in Europe that have the potential to sell virtualisation.

Jack Mandard, CEO at CompuBase, said that there was a responsibility of both vendors and distributors to help educate resellers.

Over the past few weeks there have been indications that as the virtualisation market moves down from the server to the desktop there is going to be more competition, with a wider number of vendors involved.

Frank Coggrave, vice president and general manager EMEA at NComputing, said that there were differences in the market being driven by the move into the desktop space.

“At a server level price was not the same issue because these were big problems that needed to be solved with big support issues but at the desktop there are other competitive pressures. If you are not cheaper than a PC then people will just go and buy a PC,” he said.

He added that with Microsoft making its Hyper V virtualisation offering more widely available the sever market was also facing a shake-up (see MicroScope 22 September for further analysis).