As virtualization goes mainstream and becomes an integral part of the IT infrastructure, there are increasing opportunities for IT services to help customers implement and support this expanding technology.

According to recent research from IDC, the virtualization services market will grow from $5.5 billion in 2006 to $11.7 billion in 2011, as data center managers struggle to address power and cooling issues and the need for increased capacity.

"Currently, the majority of the services opportunity lies in supporting customers' initial implementations of virtualization," said IDC's Matt Healey, senior research analyst, Software and Hardware Support Services. "However, over the next several years, IT consulting and systems integration will begin to become the dominant opportunity as the technology becomes much more mainstream."

As the technology matures, the demand for IT consulting and systems integration accelerates. IT consulting will eventually assist customers in determining how virtualization fits into the overall IT portfolio and its impact on the business.

The market for services around volume servers (servers with an average selling price of less than $25,000) will experience tremendous growth between 2006 and 2011. This is being driven by recent developments that enables customers to virtualize their x86/x64 servers.

Currently, the market for virtualization services is nascent in comparison to the overall market for IT services.

However, as the market evolves, services providers will need to be able to demonstrate virtualization capabilities to be considered for larger services engagements.

Currently the largest services opportunities for the virtualization software vendors will be around software support and education and training. However, the IT consulting and Systems integration services are showing faster growth.