VMware has publicly disputed IDC’s latest market findings that has shows Microsoft to control 23 percent of new virtualization product shipments. The first sign of its disappointment was published on the blog of Mike DiPetrillo, a principal systems analyst at VMware and then later affirmed by a company spokesman

IDC considers the strong showing to be from Microsoft’s newly launched Hyper-V or hypervisor product and the inclusion of OEM figures that IDC claims VMware has failed to factor in.

In “its first quarter of general availability Microsoft Hyper-V delivered a strong showing, and when combined with Virtual Server 2005, Microsoft’s market share is 23 percent of new shipments,” according to the IDC research note.

VMware disputed the findings from IDC due to the fact that Hyper-V was only launched in October, a few weeks from the end of the quarter and that IDC deviated from its usual research methodology where the firm would contact all vendors to give them an opportunity to view and provide feedback on the research findings before releasing to the general public.

As expected Microsoft has seized on these findings and have published on its corporate Technet blog by stating that “customers now have choice in market. VMware is no longer the dominant server virtualization vendor (less than 50 percent [of the market]). Customers now have choices that include Microsoft, Citrix, Sun, Novell, RedHat and Oracle.”