Containers spending is on the rise and channel partners see it as a money-making opportunity. Conducted by veteran Channel pundit Mike Vizard, the study titled: “Why Containers are the Biggest Channel Opportunity Since VMs,” it explores the IT Channel’s (resellers, VARs, MSPs, etc.) perceptions of the economic opportunities as companies go cloud-native. (download the full report)
“The application container market is exploding,” said Henry Baltazar, Research VP Infrastructure of 451 Research, a technology market research firm. “We forecast 2018 container spending will be $1.6 billion with a 31% compound annual growth rate through 2022.”
Today enterprises are rapidly replatforming their applications and systems for the cloud, and containers are viewed as a key enabling technology. According to Diamanti’s survey, more than 75 percent of channel partners say containers represent a moderate to massive money-making opportunity for the channel.
The report shows 43% of the Channel is already working with Docker today, and 31% is already working with Kubernetes. Over a third believes that containers will become a mainstream opportunity for the Channel in the next 12 months.
According to the survey, 49% believe that containers will be “somewhat competitive” with existing virtualization technologies, and 6% view containers as “a complete replacement” for virtualization.
Most respondents said that Amazon AWS would benefit most from the accelerated adoption of container technology, followed closely by Microsoft Azure.
66% of the Channel believes that VMware has the most to lose from the advent of containers.
“New Cloud-Native Applications” are the most common use case that the Channel sees ahead for containers (46%), with “Cloud Migrations” at 32% and “Lightweight Stateless Applications” at 26%.
45% of the Channel describes its technical knowledge of containers as “Beginner” level, with only 4% claiming “Expert” Knowledge.
“Every 10 to 15 years there’s a fundamental shift in how IT is delivered and consumed,” said Mike Vizard, author of the survey analysis and long-time channel and server infrastructure expert.
“The last three major shifts were the rise of client/server computing, the Web and virtualization. Now a fourth major shift is upon us in the form of microservices architectures enabled by container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes,” he summed up.