It is difficult to provide hard facts to this question, because our customers do not necessarily share the uses they are making with their Delphix virtualization products. Also, not everyone uses the same terminology, so this is can further obscure any response. Finally, almost every customer uses Delphix virtualization for several of these use-cases at different times, as needs dictate.
But, off the top of my head, and simply guessing at a number, it would be safe to say that 80-85% of all customers use Delphix virtualization products for the development agility and test-data management (TDM) use-cases. It is also worth noting that the adoption of agile development and DevOps processes increase the value of Delphix virtualization dramatically, to the point where agile methods and DevOps practices become impossible to realize without Delphix virtualization products included in the tool chain.
When this question was asked during a conference call, I had also guessed that the second most prevalent use-case, about 10% of all uses by customers, was reporting and support for DW/BI applications, where Delphix virtualization is used either to provide snapshots of production for ETL/ELT processing, or where Delphix virtualization is used to provide non-production environments for DW/BI (which may have never been available previously).
On later reflection, I believe that my response was incorrect. While reporting and support for DW/BI applications is significant, I believe I overlooked the use-case for migration from on-premise to IaaS cloud for AWS and Azure, which has developed over the past 12-18 months and is growing rapidly.
Delphix virtualization is an ideal mechanism for cloud migration, since the efficiencies of virtualization in unmetered on-premise environments become even more important in metered IaaS environments. Simply put, Delphix virtualization provides the most efficient use of storage and network transfers in IaaS environment where these resources are charged monthly.
At the present time, I estimate that 15-20% of current Delphix customers either use Delphix virtualization in their cloud migrations or intend to do so.
As I mentioned previously, these are simply personal guesses, and are not based on any verifiable or quantified facts.