Stephen Shankland from CNET reported that more than 80 percent of VMware income comes from higher-level tools, a move that gives the EMC subsidiary more breathing room against rivals.

In the old days, VMware made its money selling core virtualization software called a hypervisor that lets a computer run several operating systems simultaneously. Now it’s moved beyond that.

“Over 80 percent of our revenue comes from outside of our hypervisor today,” VMware President Diane Greene said in a press meeting at the company’s VMworld show in San Francisco. “We’ve done a very effective job of building products that unlock the value of virtualization for our users.”

That’s significant, given the competitive realities that face the company. The open-source Xen hypervisor today is available for free, and Microsoft plans to build a hypervisor code-named Viridian into its future Windows Server.  Read more at source.