According to IDC, the worldwide virtual machine software (VMS) market grew to $560 million in 2005, a robust 67% growth over the previous year and topping the 63% year-over-year growth recorded in 2004. "The growth in the dynamic VMS market will continue as organizations increasingly deploy VMS as a means of decoupling the application stack from the underlying hardware," said John Humphreys, research director fo According to IDC, the worldwide virtual machine software (VMS) market grew to $560 million in 2005, a robust 67% growth over the previous year and topping the 63% year-over-year growth recorded in 2004. “The growth in the dynamic VMS market will continue as organizations increasingly deploy VMS as a means of decoupling the application stack from the underlying hardware,” said John Humphreys, research director for IDC’s Enterprise Computing group. “While we believe VMS is a foundational technology to the creation of dynamic IT environments, the challenge going forward is to get users to integrate virtualization with legacy management tools and enhance management functionality to solve specific business issues.”EMC/VMware was the top VMS vendor in 2005, with a market share of over 55%. IDC believes that EMC’s ability to support many operating environments concurrently on industry-standard systems, reinforced by partnerships or alliances with almost every leading hardware supplier, contributed to that performance. Other highlights from the VMS market in 2005 include the following: Linux experienced the fastest growth Industry-standard (x86-based) systems lead the market for VMS software North American organizations purchased over half of all VMS products New use cases for the technology emerged Software Development