Worldwide Virtual Machine Software Forecast, 2024-2028

This IDC study provides a top-down sizing of the virtual machine software (VMS) market in 2023 and a 2024-2028 forecast for this market. Historical and forecast revenue data is shown for the total worldwide market. Virtual machine software is a submarket of the software-defined compute (SDC) software functional market. Virtual machine software includes hypervisor revenue derived from traditional noncloud server virtualization deployments and does not include hypervisor revenue that is bundled with cloud system software for cloud deployments.According to Gary Chen, research director, IDC's Software-Defined Compute, "Hypervisors are the foundation underlying modern datacenters and public clouds and under most containers. However, as a commercial market, virtualization is slowly transforming into a technology used to support cloud and container systems rather than a standalone solution."