VMware Inc. history, profile and corporate video
VMware, Inc. provides virtualization infrastructure solutions utilized by organizations to help transform the way they build, deliver and consume information technology resources. The company’s virtualization infrastructure solutions, which include a suite of products designed to deliver a software-defined data center, run on industry-standard desktop computers and servers and support a wide range of operating system and application environments, as well as networking and storage infrastructures. It delivers customer-proven solutions that accelerate IT by reducing complexity and enabling more flexible, agile service delivery. The company was founded by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Edward Wang and Edouard Bugnion in 1998 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA.“
“VMware History
In 1998, VMware was founded by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Edward Wang and Edouard Bugnion. Greene and Rosenblum, who are married, first met while at the University of California, Berkeley. Edouard Bugnion remained the chief architect and CTO of VMware until 2005, and went on to found Nuova Systems (now part of Cisco). For the first year, VMware operated instealth mode, with roughly 20 employees by the end of 1998. The company was launched officially early in the second year, in February 1999, at the DEMO Conference organized by Chris Shipley. The first product, VMware Workstation, was delivered in May 1999 and entered the server market in 2001 with VMware GSX Server (hosted) and VMware ESX Server (hostless).
In 2003, VMware launched VMware Virtual Center, the VMotion, and Virtual SMP technology. 64-bit support appeared in 2004. The same year, the company was acquired by EMC Corporation for US$625 million.
In August 2007, EMC released 15% of the company’s shares in VMware in an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock debuted at US$29 per share and closed the day at $51.
On July 8, 2008, VMware co-founder, president and CEO Diane Greene, was unexpectedly fired by the VMware Board of Directors and replaced by Paul Maritz, a retired 14-year Microsoft veteran who was heading EMC’s cloud computing business unit.In the same news release VMware stated that 2008 revenue growth will be “modestly below the previous guidance of 50% growth over 2007”. As a result, market price of VMware dropped nearly 25%. Then, on September 10, 2008, Rosenblum, the company’s chief scientist, resigned.
On September 16, 2008, VMware announced its collaboration with Cisco to provide joint data center solutions. One of the first results of this is the Cisco Nexus 1000V, a distributed virtual software switch that will be an integrated option in the VMware infrastructure.
On April 12, 2011, VMware released an open source platform-as-a-service system called Cloud Foundry, as well as a hosted version of the service. This supported application deployment for Java, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Node.js, and Scala, as well as database support for MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Postgres, RabbitMQ.
In April 2011, EMC transferred control of the Mozy backup service to VMware.
In March 2013, VMware gave details of a corporate spin-off of Pivotal. All of VMware’s application- and developer-oriented products, including Spring, tc Server, Cloud Foundry, RabbitMQ, GemFire, and SQLFire were transferred to this organization. It also announced that it was introducing its own IaaS service, vCloud Hybrid Service, in a shift of its strategy of selling software to cloud service providers.
In April 2013, Pivotal was formally created with General Electric (GE) as a minority shareholder.
In May 2013, VMware launched vCloud Hybrid Service at its new Palo Alto headquarters, announcing an early access program in a Las Vegas data center. The service is designed to function as an extension of its customer’s existing vSphere installations, with full compatibility with existing virtual machines virtualized with VMware software and tightly integrated networking. The service is based on vCloud Director 5.1/vSphere 5.1.
In September 2013 at VMworld San Francisco, VMware announced general availability of vCloud Hybrid Service and expansion to Sterling, Virginia, Santa Clara, California, Dallas, Texas, and a service beta in the UK. It also pre-announced a disaster recovery and desktop-as-a-service offering based on Desktone, which it went on to acquire in October 2013.
Mozy was transferred to Dell in 2016 after the merger of Dell and EMC Corp. (which later became Dell EMC).
At the time of the merger between Dell and EMC, EMC Corp. owned around 80% of the stock of VMware, and after the merger VMware was maintained as a separate company, held via a new tracking stock, while the rest of EMC were rolled into Dell.
After the merger, Dell was re-organized with a new parent company, Dell Technologies; Dell’s consumer and workstation businesses are internally referred to as the Dell Client Solutions Group (CSG), being is one of the company’s main business divisions alongside Dell EMC and VMware.
On April 15, 2021, Dell Technologies is reported to spin out remaining of its VMware stakes to shareholders and the two companies will continue to operate without major changes for at least five years.
Acquisitions
In October 2005, VMware acquired Asset Optimization Group, specializing in capacity planning.
In May 2008, VMware acquired Israeli start-up company B-hive Networks for an undisclosed sum. Following the acquisition VMware opened an R&D center in Israel, based initially on B-Hive’s facilities and team in Israel.
In October 2008, VMware acquired Grenoble-based mobile hypervisor developer Trango Virtual Processors.
On November 26, 2008, VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics, a company with core expertise in 3D graphics driver development.
On August 10, 2009, VMware announced the acquisition of SpringSource, which did enterprise and web application development and management. The acquisition allowed use of the term platform as a service (PaaS). The acquisition expanded VMware’s education services to include SpringSource University and its authorized training partners such as Spring People in India. The SpringSource assets became part of the Pivotal joint venture in April 2013.
On January 12, 2010, VMware acquired Zimbra, an open-source collaboration software tool, from Yahoo (later sold in July 2013 to Telligent Systems).
On May 6, 2010, VMware acquired GemStone, to be operated under VMware’s SpringSource division.
On April 26, 2011, VMware acquired SlideRocket a startup which developed a SaaS application for building business presentations that are stored online. Through a Web-based interface, users can handle all parts of the process, from designing slides and compiling content, to reviewing documents and publishing and delivering them. VMware subsequently sold SlideRocket to ClearSlide on March 5, 2013.
On May 22, 2012, Wanova was acquired .
On July 2, 2012, DynamicOps was acquired .
On July 23, 2012, Nicira, Inc. was acquired .
On February 11, 2013, Virsto was acquired .
On October 15, 2013, Desktone was acquired .
On January 22, 2014, VMware acquired AirWatch for US$1.54 billion. Wandering WiFi was also included in the acquisition.”
*Information from Forbes.com and Wikipedia.org
**Video published on YouTube by “VMware“
