Thomas Bittman, vice president and distinguished analyst at research firm Gartner, wrote up a list of five changes in the virtualization market trending this year.

The bottom line is that there’s a lot of competition out there, and even more at stake as enterprises invest more in the cloud. VMware is now far from being the only option.

And the top trend Bittman names is exactly that: the competitiveness of the market. It’s more of an intro to the rest of his insight than a category of its own, considering it encompasses a very big portion of the following items in his post.

“ Imagine how the virtualization market would be different if the server virtualization trend was starting today. VMware’s competition has greatly improved in the past few years, and price is becoming a big differentiator. Enterprises that have not yet started to virtualize (and they exist, but tend to be small) have real choices today.”

This brings us to the second and third bulletins in the Gartner article: more choice, and lower rates.

Today enterprises can choose from a long list of virtualization technologies, and are increasingly adopting the policy of leveraging separate hypervisors at different locations. This creates an opportunity for other vendors, who compete not only via innovating but also with pricing. VMware caused an outcry from its customers when it changed its vSphere licensing to a pricier model – one that it eventually reverted after a negative reaction from the market.

Bittman’s 4^th virtualization trend touches the same area. He says that the increased adoption – from smaller companies as well – is further driving prices down, and impacts other segments server manufacturers and even IaaS, which is the focus of the final trend on his list. “Cloud service providers are taking bets,” he says. And it’s a claim recent developments with AWS’s Cloud Gateway further validates.