I wanted to wish everyone a Happy and Safe New Year!  And I also wanted to thank each of you for being a loyal member of VMBlog.com.  I launched the site back in 2004 and I've enjoyed each and every day helping to do my small part by spreading the word of virtualization to the masses... a subject near and dear to all of you.  And 2008 has proven to be quite an adventure in the virtualization market.  2009 is going to be an interesting year for all of us and also for the world in general.  And I'm very excited and enthusiastic by the prospects!

So what's on tap for 2009?  Where is virtualization headed?  This game changing technology is constantly changing and adapting to business needs throughout the corporate world.  We have desktop, server, application, and storage virtualization.  The mobile world is now getting the benefit from virtualization as well.  And we're seeing memory and file virtualization up and coming.  Virtualization breathes life into VDI, the Cloud, Thin Clients, mobile computing, the new data center and more.  Where does it end?  How many areas of technology can it touch?

If you want to find out more and if you haven't already read the exclusive VMBlog Executive 2009 Virtualization Prediction Series, you might want to check it out to see what many of these virtualization executives see coming in 2009.  We are very fortunate to be able to get insight from all of these key virtualization players, and I thank them for taking their time to share these thoughts and ideas with us.

##

Parallels - The virtualization industry has seen its fair share of change in the past year or so, with Microsoft releasing its long-awaited Hyper-V and VMware taking on new leadership and potentially a new direction. The action is set to continue in 2009, with further developments and trends emerging to shape ... Read More...

CommVault - In an era with sluggish spending and economic uncertainty, companies today are seeing a need to do more with either the same budget or a smaller budget. In fact, the numbers are grim for storage spending in 2009, as many storage managers are facing budget cuts up to 50 percent. What adds to the prob... Read More...

VMware - As the woes of the world economy extend into 2009, governments and businesses will be increasingly forced to do more with less. This is one of the key value propositions of virtualization, and as a result, virtualization is increasingly at the top of the list of strategic priorities for organization... Read More...

AMD - Virtualization has come a long way since late 1999 when VMware hit the market with the first x86 virtualization product, VMware Virtual Platform. Back then, virtualization was a heavy software task. That’s not to say it’s a simple task today. But because of hardware-assisted virtualization technol... Read More...

INSYSTEK - Virtualization is the fastest growing technology platform to emerge in the past 30 years. Virtualization of the desktops, applications, and networks is the natural progression of the technology. Research analysts concur, that by the end of 2010, all new deployments in Corporate America will be virt... Read More...

ParaScale - 2008 is the year that “cloud” captured the imagination of the technology early-adopters. And the interest is not just in Silicon Valley or the U.S. ParaScale, for instance, has had hundreds of software download requests over the past few months from around the globe. But vendors should be under no ... Read More...

Oracle - Virtualization has been around the enterprise data center for a long time, mostly on mainframes and proprietary hardware. For industry standard hardware, 2008 was the year in which virtualization made the jump from workstations onto servers in the data center, but generally for less critical or non... Read More...

Catbird - Prediction #1: Will VMware continue to be the dominate player? Yes. The 800 pound Hypervisor gorilla is still King. VMware spent the first half of the decade insinuating their product into every engineering lab on the planet. This investment will continue to pay big dividends in 2009. Citri... Read More...

Woven Systems - Server virtualization is a fast growing data center trend boosted by the growing compute capacity of x86 server architectures and proliferation of hardware and software solutions leveraging this power. Server virtualization enables data center operators to maximize physical server resource utilizati... Read More...

Netuitive - The search for higher capacity utilization, greater system flexibility and lower operating costs put thousands of companies on the path to server virtualization in 2008 - and early indicators point to this trend continuing in 2009. But organizations are just beginning to learn that managing system p... Read More...

Apani - 2008 was an exciting year for server virtualization. Microsoft released Hyper-V, VMware made several acquisitions and large platform vendors like IBM announced solutions in the space. It was also a bright year for the virtualization security market. While server virtualization solutions themselve... Read More...

Virtual Computer - Riding a continuing wave of hardware cost savings, greater management efficiency, and improved security through server virtualization, IT managers have been quick to turn their attention to end-user desktops as the next frontier for virtualization. There is little love among the IT community for tr... Read More...

Neverfail - Virtualization. It’s a word that is unavoidable and seems to encompass everything from solving the world’s global warming issues to enabling all high availability issues and perhaps even being a cure for the common cold! But will the world be a truly virtual place in the future? If you listen to ... Read More...

KACE - Virtualization in 2008 continued to prove its importance in the areas of migration, high availability, system/data center consolidation, and also energy conservation. Virtualization has quickly rooted itself as a key computing technology in both the consumer and enterprise sectors. To date, virtua... Read More...

Citrix - As we close out 2008, we’re nearing the emergence of a new wave of the hot, hot technology of virtualization. During 2008, we saw the first wave of virtualization in full swing and mainstream usage; we saw customers clamoring for server consolidation at lower costs. It was all about virtualization f... Read More...

Surgient - Saving money and delivering ROI have been the strategic benefits of wares from technology companies for years. Ever since the end of the last recession, new technologies have arisen only if, in some way, they can demonstrate a return. Virtualization delivers significant ROI, and applications tha... Read More...

Egenera - During 2009, we will see the market for virtualization finally evolve. It will expand from the current myopic perspective of hardware virtualization to include realizations that: There are many types of hardware and OS virtualization, each appropriate for different uses and environments, For tr... Read More...

Enomaly - The year 2008 has been a big one for cloud computing. In a rather dramatic shift, we've seen the term "cloud" enter the collective IT consciousness. It seems almost every technology vendor, big or small, has embraced the movement to the cloud as a software and marketing philosophy. Generally, cloud ... Read More...

RNA Networks - Memory Virtualization, like server and storage virtualization, offers the benefits of consolidation and compelling cost savings. Yet over and above early server and storage implementations, in 2009 Memory Virtualization will introduce a new way of thinking about virtualization that challenges the w... Read More...

Citrix - I’ve been surprised by the recent negative bias in the virtualization press. Since VMworld 2008 (a remarkable week in which amongst other - positive - virtualization news VMware’s stock dropped below its IPO price as the market tanked), the tech press has collectively bemoaned the “pitfalls of virt... Read More...

Wyse - For anyone that's ever met me, you know that I tend to be enthusiastic -- about business, about life, about just about everything. So please don't hold that against me as I talk about how excited I am about the prospects for the desktop virtualization market in 2009. There's no question that the... Read More...

VKernel - Some industry experts are saying that virtualization is almost a recession proof technology. While I don’t completely buy into that thinking, there are many core benefits to virtualization that can help organizations control costs, which will keep virtualization at the top of every organizations’ I... Read More...

Vizioncore - If there ever was a technology that could be associated with “instant karma,” that would be virtualization. No other technology in recent history has the potential for such immediate positive impacts from its deployment which explains why virtualization adoption is on the rise and, if anything, wil... Read More...

Emulex - 2008 was the year that virtualization adoption evolved and became more mainstream – when users began to shift their view of server virtualization from that of a simple tool for consolidation to one of a means to create a more robust computing platform, hosting more demanding applications via virtual... Read More...

Microsoft - The late American baseball player and manager Casey Stengel once said, “Never make predictions, especially about the future.” This is good advice, but you don’t have to be Malcolm Gladwell to be able to look at the virtualization market today and spot some clear trends, such as: the budget pressu... Read More...

rPath - Of course, in this context, “interesting” is the unmistakable polite cocktail party euphemism for pensive concern. Despite a faintly detectable hopefulness (it’s there if you look for it), there is an overriding anxiety about a deepening global recession. But against this backdrop, a transformat... Read More...

Tranxition - 2009 will see IT struggling to achieve at least some of the cost benefits of VDI without imposing major disruption and lost productivity on the user base. The elephant in the VDI planning room is how to get from today’s highly personalized fat client environment to at least a partially VDI-based inf... Read More...

CohesiveFT - 2009 in Virtualization and Cloud Computing: The Year of the Virtualization Professional Virtualization is the key architectural break that is driving a massive transformation in the world of computing, a transformation that will affect the way businesses work and people live. It is computing “gone t... Read More...

Certeon - The dynamic enterprise has long been sought after by IT managers. But until recently, legacy system sprawl has prevented the truly dynamic enterprise to take hold. Because vendors hawking proprietary appliances had so much invested in the game, they continued to churn out products that only added ... Read More...

Reflex Systems - The virtualization train is leaving the station in 2009 and your organization better be on board. Virtualization has changed the game for data centers and an accelerated market adoption in 2009 will further prove this to be true. While we have seen several organizations test the virtual waters to d... Read More...

3PAR - As we round the corner into 2009, many IT industry veterans are hanging their hats on the hopes of virtualization to get us through these troubled economic times. With mounting interest in cloud and self-service computing as delivery models for enterprise IT, it’s increasingly important for organiza... Read More...

VirtualLogix - We live in the mobile century. Almost 2 years have passed since the official introduction of the first iPhone and what a difference have those 2 years made. Since then, smart phones have gone to market with Google’s Android software and RIM has followed suit by updating their latest gizmos that do a... Read More...

Sun Microsystems - Businesses already face a wide range of challenges going into 2009. While cost-cutting moves may dominate the headlines, many companies will be focusing on making wise investments that both reduce costs and enable them to better leverage technology. Not surprisingly, Gartner recently ranked virtuali... Read More...

Skytap - Maybe it’s the economy, but I’m feeling a lot more conservative than usual these days – especially, when it comes to making predictions. But, after working at a cloud computing start-up for the past few years, I’m actually pretty confident about the future of the cloud in 2009. Looking back, I’ve ... Read More...

Symantec - In 2008, as enterprises of all sizes began to realize increasing benefits from endpoint virtualization, we saw a flurry of new companies dipping their toes into the endpoint virtualization pool. The result has been the movement of endpoint virtualization towards the inevitable outcome that all succe... Read More...

Entuity - Virtualization technology is one of the latest examples of how you can have too much of a good thing. As enterprises look to balance the potential return from its application with the operational challenges it creates, IT organizations will seek to balance versatility with manageability in 2009. M... Read More...

Computer Associates - IT organizations continue to adopt virtualization aggressively, often across multiple IT silos (server, storage, desktop, etc.) to extend its cost advantages. However, recent conversations with CIOs are revealing a key trend that is transcending the cost paradigm, the development of a “virtualizatio... Read More...

RingCube Technologies - With so much uncertainty in the global marketplace and enterprises scrutinizing IT budgets more than ever before, hardware and software purchases need to be as strategic as possible. Many of these companies have turned to virtualization to stretch IT dollars and lower their technology costs. Compa... Read More...

Lanamark - Virtualization offers a number of benefits – better utilization of IT resources, lower power and cooling costs, improved manageability and so on and so forth. In tough economic times, these benefits become even more pronounced, particularly when organizations face IT budget freezes or cuts. As we em... Read More...

### 

And once again, I'd like to thank all of these companies and their executives for taking the time to share with us their vision and predictions of where this technology is headed throughout 2009.