While most of the focus of VMworld 2012's day 1 keynote was concentrated on the enterprise market, VMware did show signs it is working on courting the small to medium-sized business (SMB) community as well, primarily with an updated version of vSphere 5.1 Essentials Plus. VMware seems to have a pretty solid grip on the larger enterprise market with its server virtualization product, so it makes sense for it to try and expand by going after SMBs. And it's still early enough to be anyone's game.

Microsoft just delivered Windows Server 2012, which comes with an updated, more powerful and feature-rich version of Hyper-V. The SMB market has been a pretty sweet spot for Microsoft over the years, and Hyper-V continues that focus while stoking the company's hopes of being able to later expand and displace VMware in the enterprise market. To do that the Redmond giant has been spending a lot of marketing dollars to convince companies that its hypervisor product is just as good as vSphere but comes with a much cheaper price tag.

Recent studies have shown that virtualization is now mainstream amongst SMBs, and those companies are becoming increasingly focused on extending the benefits of virtualization to improve IT availability and backup and recovery. Spiceworks, a company with more than two million IT pros within its community, recently found that 77 percent of SMBs are either using or planning to use virtualization software by the second half of 2012.

It therefore shouldn't come as much of a surprise that VMware is finally ready to go after the SMB market. VMware's vice president and general manager of SMB solutions, Russ Stockdale, said that SMBs face most of the same technical challenges as larger businesses and enterprises, but they have far fewer resources to devote to virtualization.

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Read the entire InfoWorld Virtualization Report article.