Every New Year brings along with it many new things and so would 2011; speaking precisely of the IT sector, it is expected to change too. So what are the kinds of anticipated changes in this sector? Well, first of all it is going to grow; It is one of those few things in life that have and will continue to grow, so far a threshold for its growth cannot be seen. Firms that were still using manual system will definitely switch to virtualization and firms that already follow a virtual system will expand. A prediction made by The Market Intel Group states “forecasted cumulative global market topping US$ 290 billion for the Virtualization sector, and US$ 300 billion for the Cloud Computing sector, over the report’s period (2011-2016)”.

Of course this is good news for the poorly performing economies, at least one sector of it is expected to perform well however this also confirms that fact that most of the companies will turn towards virtualization because it will help them manage the businesses more efficiently and save money. Earlier virtualization was considered a benefit that was achieved through economies of scale but with the year 2011 this is going to change because small and medium size businesses are expected to adopt virtualization. There are a few large scale but multiple small and medium sized businesses so the IT sector is planning to innovate technology that is suitable and affordable by small and medium businesses.

Data Center Knowledge has predicted that in 2011 35% of SMBs will make use of Hyper-V. Microsoft Hyper-V is considered as the virtualization answer for small and medium businesses. Thirdly it is expected that automatic maintenance will be developed; we all know the number of virtualized machines has increased drastically over the years and since they are machines they need servicing and maintenance. Manually maintenance of these large number of machines is a near to impossible task therefore companies would require a more dependable automatic solution. Obviously a fully automated service system cannot be established in a year but steps in this direction are definitely expected. The tools that are used to manage a virtualized environment are not just limited to automation; the administrators of the system perform several tasks like backup, recovery and live migration etc and specific tools are require for these tasks, the vendors of virtualization are well aware of this therefore they keep working on creating such tools and in the year 2011 we do expect some new tools to be introduced that would making managing the virtualized environment more efficient. Virtualized desktops are cheaper to install and run because less hardware is required to run the same number of machines, it is more helpful to enterprises that are using Windows Vista or XP since these windows require greater amount of hardware to work properly.

Desktop virtualization was overlooked in the past years, but 2011 is expected to change this for good.