VMWare itself in February released a free, entry-level hosted virtualization product online for Linux and Windows servers (which has more than one million downloads), and has made a number of announcements since then.

"Everything we are doing as a company right now is about opening up virtualization to as many members of the IT community and general public as possible," said VMware Australia managing director, Paul Harapin.

Even though the company already has 20,000 customers worldwide, more than 90 percent of which are running its virtual infrastructure in production, Harapin feels there's a much greater opportunity yet to be tapped and the company is looking to other vendors to help.

This is why the company is releasing its source code to other IT vendors that register as part of its Community Source (http://www.vmware.com/communitysource/) partner program so that they can build their systems to interoperate.

"So the likes of Intel, HP, Dell, IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, SAP, CA and many more are all part of our ecosystem and have access to our source code. They are not just partners. They are actually all writing their product sets to really integrate tightly with what we do," he said.