The server virtualization market is continuing to grow year over year, where IDC currently targets the annual growth rate at around 60%. The key is to continue to get consumers onboard with the technology through education, increasing ease of use, relaxing pricing, and by continuing to open up new channels of delivery to get the product into the hands of the people. Virtual Iron is trying to address the pricing The server virtualization market is continuing to grow year over year, where IDC currently targets the annual growth rate at around 60%. The key is to continue to get consumers onboard with the technology through education, increasing ease of use, relaxing pricing, and by continuing to open up new channels of delivery to get the product into the hands of the people.Virtual Iron is trying to address the pricing and complexity gap with their enterprise virtualization solution, and they also just announced the expansion of their European distribution partnership with Avnet Technology Solutions. Already in Belgium, Germany and Italy, this agreement futher pushes Virtual Iron’s product into Europe by expanding into Australia, Switzerland, The United Kingdom, France, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Russia, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Ukraine. “The market for virtualization is expanding rapidly across Europe and our channel partners are looking for solutions that create new opportunities and enable their value-added services,” said Sukh Rayat, vice president for EMEA sales at Avnet Technology Solutions. “Virtual Iron has differentiated itself from other solutions with very comprehensive capabilities in the industry’s easiest-to-use package. The product is well-suited to address a wide variety of data center initiatives and opens up a whole new market segment for our channel partners.” Virtualization giant VMware is also expanding its efforts. The company just announced a new channel distribution agreement with the Advanced Infrastructure Solutions (AIS) Division of Tech Data Corporation. AIS has been supporting value-added resellers that are implementing virtualization solutions to enhance IT operations for end users from the small sized business to the very large enterprise.Tech Data has trained more than 200 inside and field sales representatives, product managers and systems engineers, who are either certified VMware Sales Professionals (VSPs) or VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs). The company plans to more than double the number of VSPs and VCPs as it trains additional resources in the coming months.“Virtualization is doing much more than transforming data centers through server consolidation,” said Senior Vice President and General Manager, Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Pete Peterson. “The applications for virtualization extend way beyond the data center, providing VARs and their end-user customers with significant opportunities to implement more efficient and cost-effective IT strategies. From secure application access through thin client and blade PC solutions to enhanced data protection and business continuity, VARs and their CIO customers need to understand the far-reaching benefits of implementing virtualization solutions like those from VMware.” Software Development