Worldwide Availability and Clustering Software 2007 Vendor Shares

This IDC study examines the availability and clustering software (ACS) market for the calendar year 2007, including software revenue based on product licenses and maintenance fees. The worldwide market size is provided for 2007, along with trends in the marketplace, and identifies the characteristics that new vendors will need to be successful in this market space. It presents a vendor competitive analysis and revenue shares of the leading ACS vendors, along with brief profiles of the top vendors.

"IDC notes an increasing trend for ACS providers to partner with virtualization providers, to ensure high availability for applications that are hosted by virtual machines (VMs)," said Jean S. Bozman, research vice president in IDC's Enterprise Platforms Group. "It is increasingly the case that traditional high-availability failover software includes support for both physical (P) and virtual (V) servers."

"Although revenue growth remains strong in the ACS market worldwide, IDC notes that several industry trends could dampen future growth," Bozman continued. "To the extent that clustering or failover software is being positioned as too expensive or too complex, then some of the software vendors in the virtualized x86 server space may market their products as alternatives to traditional HA. However, customers must carefully examine whether the virtualization offerings provide equivalent functionality as traditional ACS products. Often, a combination of ACS software and virtualization software - often deployed with data replication software at customer sites - completes the overall HA deployments, ensuring that both planned downtime and unplanned downtime scenarios are addressed with a spectrum of HA software solutions."