Virtualisation vendor VMware saw its share price jump by as much as 91 per cent on the first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

The firm floated 33 million shares on Tuesday at $29 each. The stock peaked at $55.50 and closed at $51, up 76 per cent from the opening price.

VMware's initial public offering was highly anticipated, because the firm is currently by far the largest vendor of virtualisation software for Intel and AMD servers.

Pioneered on mainframe computers in the late 1960s, virtualisation promises to dramatically increase server utilisation rates by allowing a single physical server to act as multiple standalone units.

Current utilisation rates for x86 servers average around 10 to 15 per cent. Virtualisation can boost these figure to as much as 80 per cent.

The virtualisation market is expected to grow as AMD's and Intel's current processors feature accelerators that cut back on overhead, narrowing the performance gap between a regular and a virtualised system.

Additional performance gains are delivered by the introduction of bare metal hypervisor technology, where the virtualisation technology runs directly on the hardware.

The technology is faster than software based virtualisation, where the software runs as a regular application inside a computer's main operating system.

VMware offers both virtualisation technologies. Most of its competitors, including Microsoft and Parallels, rely on software-based virtualisation.

The open source Xen technology also runs a bare metal hypervisor. Although Xen is supported by XenSource, Red Hat and Novell, the technology is trailing behind VMware's.

VMware is a subsidiary of storage vendor EMC, which continues to hold a controlling stake of nearly 90 per cent of VMware stock.

Intel and Cisco purchased stakes in VMware in the month before the IPO.