Palo Alto based VMware has over 250,000 customers and still owns the lion’s share of the virtualization market, with a dominant product set that offers everything from simple server consolidation to data center automation, including enterprise class cloud computing environments.

The company's flagship product, the vSphere Hypervisor (which provides a virtual operating platform to guest operating systems), faces increasing competition however from players such as Microsoft, Citrix and Oracle, resulting in a declining market share. Its Rivals have certainly started to catch up in terms of performance and features.

In terms of the virtualization market, competition is a major concern for VMware as Citrix's XenServer and Microsoft's Hyper-V gain parity. But VMware isn’t standing still – they have shifted focus towards cloud computing and intend to use their huge virtualization enterprise customer base as leverage to move customers to utilize their enterprise-level hypervisor for cloud computing, the ESX. With the hybrid cloud market expected to grow significantly over the next few years, things are looking bright for VMware on the back of its recently launched hybrid cloud services.

However, in terms of virtualization, it certainly is not a one-horse race anymore.