The shift to virtualisation has caused some turmoil for the rest of the software industry, however, which has traditionally priced its products based on the number of servers, or in some cases the number of server processors, that are running the code.
Some interim pricing moves have largely addressed the current situations, but fundamentally, Haff said, software pricing will have to change more as virtualisation takes hold.
"I expect that we are going to tend to see more software being licensed per-employee or per-use or metrics that are really much more tied toward the value that software is delivering as measured directly," Haff said.
News.com's Dawn Kawamoto contributed to this report.
