I got a note from a notable virtualization company today proclaiming that this year is going to be the year of virtualization. With the arrival and notoriety gained by Xen last year I don't doubt it in the Linux space. Along with the popularity of the commercial tools like VMware things are looking very interesting. In a recent Goldman Sachs survey*, enterprise CIOs were asked to rank which software vendors were “gaining or losing share of your IT spending dollars.” Notable gainers were:
1. VMware
5. Oracle
7. Red Hat
8. Microsoft
And the losers:
1. Novell
2. CA
I think it's going to be a great year for IT. I think it's going to be a whole new ball game though compared to the spending habits of the dot.com era. I think IT is back but I qualify that as "smart IT" where purchases are scrutinized and value solutions win out over long time trusted names that come with hefty price tags. I think that Windows will continue to succumb to Linux in the data center, MySQL and Postgres will continue to win projects that once fell to Oracle and DB/2.
I think the real opportunity is for management and development tools to continue to build applications that compliment open source software. Well now that it's in print you can can call B.S. if I am wrong.