The thematic landscape of virtualization technologies (1998 – 2013)

In recent years, virtualization has come into the spotlight as an enabler of cloud computing, and is evolving from the growth stage to the maturity stage. This paper presented the thematic structure of virtualization technologies over the period 1998–2013, in which virtualization technology shifted from a nascent technology to a key technology of cloud computing. More specifically, we discovered hidden thematic structure in a large collection of patents relating to virtualization by identifying topics through the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model.