Native cloud adoption to push container management revenue to $944 million by 2024: Gartner

Worldwide container management market is expected to see a rise in revenue from $465.8 million in 2020 to $944 million in 2024, according to a forecast by Stamford, Connecticut based research organisation Gartner.  

A container is a unit that places all the software and its reliables into one code. The term originated in the early 2010s as a means of ensuring that software can run seamlessly even if it is moved from one computing environment to another.

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Currently, containers have become popular as they help solve concerns around delivery, agility portability, modernisation and other issues that application developers face.  Adoption of cloud-native applications and infrastructure is further expected to drive the incremental but widespread growth. 

Managing these solutions can be difficult and, in turn, requires container orchestration, which refers to the deployment, management, networking, scaling, and automation of container-based applications.

Within container management, public cloud container orchestration and serverless container offerings were set to witness maximum growth, Gartner said.

The research firm predicts that by as early as 2022, over 75% of global companies will be running containerized applications in production compared to 30% today.

“There has been considerable hype and a high level of interest in container technology, but a lower level of production deployments to date,” Michael Warrilow, research vice president at Gartner said.

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Gartner predicts that close to 15% of enterprise applications will run in a container environment by 2024, while the current number stands at 5%. The number is largely dragged down by budget constraints, application backlog as well as organizational priorities who are looking to tackle the economic downturn and the effects of the pandemic.

“The bottleneck will be the speed at which applications can be refactored and/or replaced,” Warrilow added.

Warrilow also said that while containerization might not directly lead to an incremental increase in revenue, it could help be the catalyst for a range of adjacent segments such as application management, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and on-premise hardware.

IaaS revenue associated with container management is expected to reach $1 billion by 2023, Gartner has earlier predicted. 

“Containers could ultimately fuel an open ecosystem similar to Linux,” Warrilow said.