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As a marketer of emerging technology, I am always looking where the business is, where the market is, and most importantly whether the timing of our business is spot on for our customers. There are all sorts of ways to measure this, however a a couple of indicators have recently painted a picture of growth for software appliances, so I wanted to share them with you.

IDC recently issued its Third Annual Software Appliance End-User Survey which offers a 'state of the union' of software appliance adoption. The survey confirms that appliances adoption is on the upswing. This matches up nicely with the rapidly growing number of requests we have been fielding from industry giants on the same subject just within the last month.

According to the survey the terms "software appliances" and/or "virtual appliances" are now well known by most survey respondents – indicating that these terms are increasingly becoming part of the IT vernacular. The survey also noted that software appliance adoption is growing within companies. One out of every four (25%) of the 307 respondents in this survey say that they now are either evaluating or using software appliances - not too bad considering we've been weathering a down economy in which many ISVs might not be willing to invest time and money in educating the market on appliances.

Finally, I'd like to mention another positive indicator - the software industry press. This past summer we launched the appliance program and spent a lot of our time explaining what a software appliance is to the press. During briefings related to the SUSE Appliance Toolkit launch in January, I was pleasantly surprised when I found that I no longer need to start each interview with the definition of a software appliance! Progress indeed!

So...what do you think? What are you seeing out there in the market? Anyone using appliances now?

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.