When back in 2005 we asked our globe-girdling network of industry executives, enterprise architects, software engineers, technology evangelists, analysts, and VCs to pinpoint what they thought the Next Big Thing would be, only one respondent singled out Virtualization and that was software industry legend Mitchell Kertzman, of San Francisco-based VC firm Hummer Winblad.

Here is what Kertzman, now managing director Hummer Winblad Venture Partners but still famous for having been the founder and CEO of Powersoft, which merged with Sybase in February 1995, predicted:

“There will be more and more software products built not on traditional hardware/software platforms, but on virtualized platforms.”

Since then of course research firm IDC has stated that spending on virtualization software and services is expected to exceed $15 billion worldwide by 2011 - up from $6.5 billion in 2006. So Kertzman was right on the money!

In short, virtualization is fast becoming a key requirement for every server in the data center, enabling increased workloads in server consolidation projects, efficient software development and testing, resource management for dynamic data centers, application re-hosting and compatibility, and high-availability partitions.

1. Hardware virtualization (goes back to 1967) includes not just the processor and memory, but also storage, network, I/O
2. Middleware virtualization (goes back to the early 80s at least)
3. Service (SOA) virtualization, more recently formalized