VMware, Inc. the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, on Friday said that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the Leaders Quadrant of the 2012 Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure.

According to Gartner, “Virtualization penetration has surpassed 50 percent of all server workloads, and it continues to grow.” The report continues: “The x86 server virtualization infrastructure market is the foundation for two extremely important market trends that relate and overlap: infrastructure modernization and cloud computing. Virtualization is a fundamental enabler to IaaS, and will be used to establish private cloud services, public cloud services and interoperable hybrid cloud services.” 

“VMware customers of all sizes are leveraging a decade of virtualization investments to build cloud operations that will allow them to achieve the peak in automation, flexibility and efficiency,” said Rick Jackson, VMware CMO. “We believe our placement in the Leaders Quadrant underscores that VMware has the vision, strategy and offerings to help customers transform IT and deliver on the promise of cloud computing.”

VMware vSphere is the most widely deployed virtualization platform in the world, broadly utilized by enterprises, small and midsize businesses (SMBs), public cloud service providers and as a foundation for the growing virtual desktop (VDI) market.

 In the past year, VMware''s customer base has grown to more than 350,000 customers worldwide, including 100 percent of the Fortune 100.

There are now more than 125 verified VMware vCloud public clouds across 26 countries.

More than 2,000 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) support more than 3,600 applications running on VMware vSphere.