Cowen and Company predicts that Red Hat and Microsoft will be winners when it comes to growth in enterprise container adoption, while VMware could face some challenges long term.
“We continue to view Red Hat, which put containers at the core of its stack several years ago as the best positioned to take advantage of growing container adoption,” said Gregg Moskowitz, managing director and senior research analyst at Cowen, in a video tied to the report. He added that the firm expects Red Hat’s OpenShift platform to surge past $300 million in revenues in fiscal 2019.
Red Hat’s management recently stated that it had more than 650 customers using the OpenShift platform. Moskowitz added that market checks have indicated that the OpenShift platform has been pulling along additional Red Hat products, including its flagship Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform.
Microsoft is also expected to see a similar boost, driven by broad enterprise use of its Azure cloud platform. The computing giant recently noted it has seen a 10x increase in Kubernetes usage on Azure.
VMware, on the other hand, could be impacted long term by the increased use of containers in production environments.
“We believe VMware continues to underplay the container movement,” Moskowitz said. “The good news for VMware is that we think most organizations will initially deploy containers within a vSphere environment. That should enable them to navigate the container threat over the medium term. Nevertheless, there is some long-term risk for vSphere in our view.”
VMware’s vSphere is a server vitualization platform that can manage large-scale, virtual machine (VM) deployments.
