With virtualization growth comes increased demand for jobs

Virtualization continues to be a hot topic around the IT industry. If you aren’t at least aware of it, you probably haven’t picked up a magazine or a newspaper in the last three years, don’t use the Internet much, or you have little to no interest in anything technology related. And amid this economic uncertainty and energy scare that we are facing, virtualization is proving to be a “helping hand” technology in more ways than one by helping to address these worries.

Virtualization can save an organization money by helping to make the most of their current and future IT hardware spend. By virtualizing their servers, companies can get higher utilization rates out of their existing equipment and slow down the rate of future purchasing needs. Doing so also translates into reducing the datacenter footprint, thereby reducing power and cooling costs.

And although x86 virtualization has been around for about 9 years now, the technology is still considered to be in its infancy. With an estimated 5-10% of x86 servers being virtualized today, this number is expected to grow over the next few years, and with it the number of trained staff that will be needed to implement and manage it.

And that’s just the server market. Desktop virtualization and application virtualization are also becoming hot topics and growing markets as well. And here again, trained IT staff are going to be required and searched out by organizations worldwide.

While virtualization technology in its current form has been around for quite some time, it is only in the last three or so years that people have really taken a shine to it. And there aren’t that many IT workers with years of expertise on the technology. But even with this skills shortage, organizations are showing no decline in the deployment of virtualization technology. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

IDC forecasts that the worldwide virtualization market will grow to $3.5 billion in 2011, a 27.1% CAGR from 2006. VMware is currently dominating the lion’s share of the market, but other companies are up and coming and looking to take their piece of the virtual pie. Microsoft’s Hyper-V technology is expected to make its entrance into the market shortly, and Citrix has a strong breadth of solutions to attack the server, desktop, and application virtualization markets. As these and other companies continue to expand and grow in the virtualization market, so will the demand for trained staff.

According to a new report from Dice, they are seeing a growing need for virtualization-related skillsets in the marketplace. The report states:

A recent Dice poll found that almost 40 percent of respondents had “virtualized a significant number of servers and services” with another 10 percent reporting that they had plans to do so within the next twelve months. There are more than 1,500 jobs posted on Dice that require VMware experience, up 40 percent from only six months ago. Right now, only a handful of jobs call for Hyper-V knowledge, but we’ll be watching to see if demand for this skill grows once the product is released.

Indeed.com also backs up this notion of increased virtualization job growth and demand. The growth in virtualization job postings is currently dominated with VMware, which isn’t surprising. But again, as Citrix and Microsoft in particular continue to release their own products, I would suspect that their numbers will grow as well. VMware currently dominates the virtualization market, and the company refuses to slow down.