Microsoft: We ate VMware's lunch

Aggressive Microsoft slaps down VMware, Google and Apple in opening keynote at its Worldwide Partner Conference

Microsoft is pinching business from under VMware's nose, according to its chief operating officer Kevin Turner, who berated his company's biggest rivals during his presentation at its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC).

In a lively address to about 16,000 global attendees at the Washington event, Turner offered to "rescue" VMware partners by "baptising" them as Hyper-V resellers there and then.

He said Microsoft has come a long way since first dipping its toe into the virtualisation space - much to VMware's detriment.

"I remember talking with you all a few years back saying ‘hey, we're getting into virtualisation'," he said. "We had zero share. This year, ladies and gentlemen, we have 30.6 points of share! Not only that, in the past two years, the number-one competitor - VMware - well, we ate their lunch!"

He claimed the virtualisation firm lost 5.1 points of share while Microsoft gained 4.6 points over the same period and urged partners to jump ship if they had not already.

"So if any of you are still on the fence, we're looking for you," he said. "Come on over, get on board with Hyper-V before it is too late. Let's rescue you today. Come on, we'll get you all down the front and we'll get you baptised today."

He claimed that Microsoft's offerings are four times cheaper than VMware's and insisted its technology was better, before turning on devices rival Apple.

"One of the things I was really delighted to see this past year was this tweet from fellow competitor Tim Cook from Apple - great company," Turner said, displaying Cook's below tweet on the big screens.

"They run Windows in the manufacturing facility!" he said, zooming in on the Mac screens, which appear not to be running Apple's own OS. "You can't make this up!" he added, prompting laughter and applause from the audience.

Next in the firing line was Google, with whom Microsoft is embroiled in a variety of competitive battles in areas such as search and email.

Turner again claimed to have "rescued" Google customers and vowed to continue to do so in the future.

"Seven hundred and eighty-five customers we've been able to rescue in the past 18 months from Google - they were stuck," he said.

"Google was reading their email and snooping on their stuff so we rescued them. We came in and got them and they are delighted. We need another 785 next year, if not more. We've got a better product, better value and data transparency."

To view updates from the day-one keynote as they happened, take a look at our day-one live blog.