Microsoft, Symantec, VMware, Citrix, Red Hat to dominate $2.6 bn application virtualization industry

According to a report by Research and Markets, the global application virtualization market is expected to grow from USD 1.3 Billion in 2015 to USD 2.6 Billion by 2020, at an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 14.9% from 2015 to 2020. The key players of this market are Microsoft Corporation, Symantec Corporation, VMware, Inc., Citrix Systems, Inc., and Red Hat, Inc. [caption id=“attachment_1744387” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Image used for representation purpose only. Agencies[/caption] The most serious concern of today’s IT industries is to minimize the maintenance cost and maximize productivity. To achieve this, it is important for an industry to optimally use its resources. There are diverse operating systems available in the market with their own set of operating environment, features, file system, registry, support to the applications, etc. This prevents the use of an application developed considering a specific operating system to be executed on another. To use such applications one need to switch among the operating systems that support the application. This is a very tedious task for the user. Application virtualization is the solution to this problem. It allows the execution of an application under a non-native operating system. It acts as an interface between the two. Application virtualization basically translates the machine code of the application written according to its native operating system into the machine code of the non-native operating system where it is intended to be executed by the user. At the core of application virtualization, there are four important modules: input/output interface, graphics interface, hardware interface, and library functions interface. The main drivers of the market include the adoption of third platform among SMBs, decrease in administering cost of IT systems, licensing & support policies, and increase in speed & efficiency. The global application virtualization market has been segmented on the basis of applications, platforms, technologies, services, end users, verticals, and regions. The types of applications are application security virtualization, business function as a service, and virtual application management; the platform types include native platform virtualization and full platform virtualization, and the technology types include file I/O redirection, registry redirection, com isolation, dot net isolation, service isolation, application isolation, and driver isolation. According to another report by RnR Market Research firm, enterprises are adapting application virtualization market products and services to implement better speed, efficiency, and improvement in the operational process. Application virtualization includes the dynamic delivery of applications so that they can be accessed online, offline, or anywhere. With the deployment of application virtualization the enterprises achieve flexibility in their overall workflow management. Application virtualization is beneficial as compared to software virtualization and can easily be integrated with server virtualization which increases the speed and efficiency of overall IT system of the organization. It allows the execution of the incompatible application side by side at the same time. Application virtualization can also be integrated with application streaming, which streams a portions of the virtualized application to user’s computers as required. These factors help for the increasing adoption of the application virtualization market solutions.