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In his first public statement as chief executive since former and founding chief Diane Greene was ousted, Paul Maritz played up the free release of the hypervisor in the face of increased market competition in the shape of Microsoft and its own recently launched hypervisor, called Hyper-V.

A former Microsoft executive himself, Maritz said Microsoft was a "formidable" but "not invincible" competitor, especially given VMware's lead in the virtualisation market.

"The announcement is designed for those smaller organisations and those enterprises not yet using VMware to experiment with bare-metal virtualisation," said Martin Neimer, VMware senior product marketing manager.

"It will allow us to build value from the rest of the VMware portfolio when they look to greater adoption, while our channel and partners will be able to add value too on top of the core product.