Gartner Inc. today delivered its first-ever forecast for the software container management software and services market, saying that although adoption of the technology will be widespread, it’s unlikely to generate massive amounts of cash.

Software containers have enjoyed massive growth in recent years. Popular with developers, they provide way for applications to be built once and run in any kind of computing environment, helping make enterprises much more agile.

The Gartner report, titled: Forecast Analysis: Container Management (Software and Services) Worldwide, predicts that market leaders such as Red Hat, Rancher Labs Inc. and VMware Inc. will enjoy some decent revenue growth, with sales rising from $465.8 million this year to $944 million by 2024.

But that’s still lower than the $1 billion-plus that Gartner says infrastructure-as-a-service companies will rake in from hosting software containers in 2022. Moreover, it’s far less than what VMware alone generates in revenue for its legacy virtualization software products.

Despite the lack of money management software providers, Gartner reckons that software containers will become the “default choice for 75% of new customer enterprise applications” by 2024. As a result, 15% of all applications will be running in containers by then, up from just 5% today.

Gartner also said 75% of large enterprises in mature economies will be using containers in production by 2024, up from less than 35% presently.

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

That’s partly also because most enterprises have other priorities than software containers. Gartner said that things such as application backlogs, budget constraints and technical debt mean that more attention will be paid to other tasks, such as migrating workloads to the public cloud.

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