VMware still dominates the virtualization tools market

The research firm Evans Data said in Friday that VMware dominates the market for virtualization tools. But Microsoft has become a huge competitor.

Evans Data's survey of 400 North American developers in October and November showed that one-third of developers had participated in virtualization projects and 51% of developers were expected to participate in virtualization projects over the next 12 months. 56% of developers who participate in virtualization projects use VMware's tools.

Microsoft is the only major challenger, Evans said, with 37% of developers surveyed using Microsoft's virtual servers. Citrix's Xen products and Open-source software distributors Red Hat tools are far behind. Evans found that while Microsoft's software sales were strongest in value-added resellers, system integrators, and outsourcing providers that create customized applications for external customers, VMware dominates in all respects.

The appeal of virtualization is still that it can reduce energy and hardware costs by consolidating more business applications in one server. In addition, virtualization technology can provide a return on investment in the short term.

While virtualization has been a key part of the focus, the current economic situation and the declining trend in the IT budget associated with the economy have made virtualization a priority, says John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans.

The results of the survey also include: JavaScript is still the most popular dynamic language. However, the Ruby language has shown strong growth over the past year.

In addition, Evans found that two-thirds of the developers surveyed were exploring the choice of SOA (object-oriented architecture) for various projects. 37% of developers have deployed some SOA components.

Finally, debugging tools are still the most important tool for ranking, although source control management and application lifecycle management tools have almost the same high value.