Container excitement

This is the first time Gartner has published a forecast for container management, in response to the increasing importance of the underlying technology.

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

Containers have become popular because they provide a powerful tool for addressing several critical concerns of application developers, including the need for faster delivery, agility, portability, modernization and life cycle management.

Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 30% today.

As a result of the growing use of containers, enterprise demand for container management is increasing. Container management provides software and/or services that support the management of containers, at scale, in production environments.

Popularity of cloud-native applications behind container management growth

The forecast growth in enterprise adoption of container management indicates the intrinsic appeal of cloud-native architecture, according to Gartner.

“Understanding of ‘cloud-native’ varies, but it has significant potential benefits over traditional, monolithic application design, such as scalability, elasticity and agility,” said Mr. Warrilow. “It is also strongly associated with the use of containers.”

Recessed economic conditions to curb growth in medium-term

Several factors will restrict adoption among organizations developing or modernizing custom applications. Despite the need to support digital transformation, initiatives will be curbed by recessed economic conditions for at least the medium term, as organizational priorities shift to cost optimization.

Gartner expects that up to 15% of enterprise applications will run in a container environment by 2024, up from less than 5% in 2020, hampered by application backlog, technical debt and budget constraints.

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

Containers will fuel an open ecosystem

Direct revenue for container management software and services will remain a small portion of the container ecosystem. Additional revenue will come from a range of adjacent segments that are not included in Gartner’s container management forecast. This includes application development, managed services, on-premises hardware and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) among other segments.

For example, the IaaS revenue associated with container management is expected to reach $1 billion before 2023. Many of the adjacent segments are already reported in existing Gartner forecasts

“Although the direct incremental revenue may be less than many expect, containers may have a different role to play,” said Mr. Warrilow. “Containers could ultimately fuel an open ecosystem similar to Linux.”