VMware
VMware LLC is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, U.S. On November 22, 2023, Broadcom acquired VMware in a cash-and-stock transaction valued at $69 billion, with the End-User Computing division of VMware then sold to KKR and rebranded to Omnissa. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture.
VMware's desktop software runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS. VMware ESXi, its enterprise software hypervisor, is an operating system that runs on server hardware.
History
Early history
In 1998, VMware was founded by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Ellen Wang, and Edouard Bugnion. Greene and Rosenblum were graduate students 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. VMware operated in stealth mode for the first year, 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 the company entered the server market in 2001 with VMware GSX Server and VMware ESX Server.In 2003, VMware launched VMware Virtual Center, vMotion, and Virtual Symmetric Multi-Processing technology. 64-bit support was introduced in 2004.
Acquisition by EMC
On January 9, 2004, under the terms of the definitive agreement announced on December 15, 2003, EMC acquired the company with US$625 million in cash. On August 14, 2007, EMC sold 15% of VMware to the public via an initial public offering. Shares were priced at per share and closed the day at.On July 8, 2008, after disappointing financial performance, the board of directors fired VMware co-founder, president and CEO Diane Greene, who was replaced by Paul Maritz, a 14-year Microsoft veteran who was heading EMC's cloud computing business unit. Greene had been CEO since the company's founding, ten years earlier. On September 10, 2008, Mendel Rosenblum, the company's co-founder, chief scientist, and the husband of Diane Greene, resigned.
On September 16, 2008, VMware announced a collaboration with Cisco Systems. One result was the Cisco Nexus 1000V, a distributed virtual software switch, an integrated option in the VMware infrastructure.
In April 2011, EMC transferred control of the Mozy backup service to VMware.
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, PostgreSQL, and RabbitMQ.
In August 2012, Pat Gelsinger was appointed as the new CEO of VMware, coming over from EMC. Paul Maritz went over to EMC as Head of Strategy before moving on to lead the Pivotal spin-off.
In March 2013, VMware announced the corporate spin-off of Pivotal Software, with General Electric investing in the company. Most of VMware's application- and developer-oriented products, including Spring, tc Server, Cloud Foundry, RabbitMQ, GemFire, and SQLFire were transferred to this organization.
In May 2013, VMware launched its own IaaS service, 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 the general availability of vCloud Hybrid Service and expansion to Sterling, Virginia, Santa Clara, California, Dallas, Texas, and a service beta in the UK. It announced the acquisition of Desktone in October 2013.
Acquisition by Dell
In January 2016, in anticipation of Dell's acquisition of EMC, VMware announced a restructuring to reduce about 800 positions, and some executives resigned. The entire development team behind VMware Workstation and Fusion was disbanded and all US developers were immediately fired. On April 24, 2016, maintenance release 12.1.1 was released. On September 8, 2016, VMware announced the release of Workstation 12.5 and Fusion 8.5 as a free upgrade supporting Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016.In April 2016, VMware president and COO Carl Eschenbach left VMware to join Sequoia Capital, and Martin Casado, VMware's general manager for its Networking and Security business, left to join Andreessen Horowitz. Analysts commented that the cultures at Dell and EMC, and at EMC and VMware, are different, and said that they had heard that impending corporate cultural collisions and potentially radical product overlap pruning, would cause many EMC and VMware personnel to leave; VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, following rumors, categorically denied that he would leave.
In August 2016 VMware introduced the VMware Cloud Provider website.
Mozy was transferred to Dell in 2016 after the merger of Dell and EMC.
In April 2017, according to Glassdoor, VMware was ranked 3rd on the list of highest paying companies in the United States.
In Q2 2017, VMware sold vCloud Air to French cloud service provider OVH.
On January 13, 2021, VMware announced that CEO Pat Gelsinger would be leaving to step in at Intel. Intel is where Gelsinger spent 30 years of his career and was Intel's first chief technology officer. CFO Zane Rowe became interim CEO while the board searched for a replacement.
Spinoff from Dell
On April 15, 2021, it was reported that Dell would spin off its remaining stake in VMware to shareholders and that the two companies would continue to operate without major changes for at least five years. The spinoff was completed on November 1, 2021.On May 12, 2021, VMware announced that Raghu Raghuram would take over as CEO.
In May 2022, VMware announced that the company had partnered with Formula One motor racing team, McLaren Racing.
Acquisition by Broadcom
On May 26, 2022, Broadcom announced its intention to acquire VMware for approximately $61 billion in cash and stock in addition to assuming $8 billion of VMware's net debt, and that Broadcom Software Group would rebrand and operate as VMware.In November 2022, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority regulator announced it would investigate whether the acquisition would "result in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services".
The transaction closed on November 22, 2023, after a prolonged delay in getting approval from the Chinese regulator on an additional condition that VMware's server software should maintain compatibility with third-party hardware and not require the use of Broadcom's hardware products. On completion, Broadcom reorganized the company into four divisions: VMware Cloud Foundation, Tanzu, Software-Defined Edge, and Application Networking and Security, and subsequently laid off over 2,800 employees. Broadcom also relocated its headquarters from North San Jose to VMware's headquarters campus in Palo Alto.
On December 13, 2023, VMware ended availability for perpetually licensed products such as vSphere and Cloud Foundation, moving exclusively to subscription-based offerings. The company stated that this had been planned as an eventuality prior to the Broadcom acquisition.
In February 2024 private equity firm KKR and Broadcom agreed for KKR to acquire Broadcom's End-User Computing Division, formerly a division of VMware, for about $4 billion. The EUC division, renamed to Omnissa, includes the desktop and app virtualization product Omnissa Horizon and the device management suite Omnissa Workspace ONE.
On May 14, 2024, it was announced that VMware Workstation Pro and VMware Fusion Pro would be made free for personal use, with commercial use still requiring payment. In November 2024, VMware announced that commercial use would be free too.
Acquisitions
| Announcement date | Company | Description | |
| Asset Optimization Group | Specialized in capacity planning. | ||
| Akimbi Systems | Specialized in lab management. | ||
| Propero | London-based VDI provider. | ||
| Dunes Technologies | VMware acquired the Switzerland-based company for an undisclosed sum. | ||
| October 2007 | Sciant | VMware acquired the Bulgaria-based outsourcing company for an undisclosed sum. | |
| January 2, 2008 | Foedus | VMware acquired the New Hampshire based professional services company for an undisclosed sum. | |
| B-hive Networks | VMware acquired the Israel-based start-up 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. | ||
| Trango Virtual Processors | Was a Grenoble-based ARM hypervisor developer. | ||
| Blue Lane Technologies | Virtual firewall. Was integrated into vCloud networking but ultimately replaced by the much broader NSX virtual networking capabilities. | ||
| Tungsten Graphics | Core expertise in 3D graphics driver development. | ||
| SpringSource | Inventors of Spring Java open source, the most popular enterprise Java app framework for building web apps and microservices. The acquisition expanded VMware's education services to include SpringSource University and its authorized training partners such as Spring People in India. Spring became part of the Pivotal Software spin-out, spin-in. | ||
| Zimbra | Open source email system looking to challenge Exchange et al. Acquired from Yahoo and. | ||
| GemStone Systems | A highly scalable, distributed in-memory database. The Java product was included in the Pivotal spin-out and ultimately open sourced as Apache Geode. The Smalltalk product was bought by GemTalk Systems. | ||
| Jan 2011 | NeoAccel Inc | Incorporated into NSX. | |
| 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. | ||
| May 31, 2011 | Socialcast | "Like Facebook, but private and for your own employees". Enterprise Social Networking and Collaboration. | |
| PacketMotion | User Activity Monitoring startup. Its PacketSentry product was planned to be incorporated into VMware vCloud Networking and Security but then it was discontinued by the end of 2012. | ||
| Wanova | |||
| DynamicOps | A cloud management system originally spun out of Credit Suisse. VMware rebranded products as Automation and vRealize Orchestrator, and ultimately incorporated into the Suite—now branded as VMware Aria Automation. | ||
| Nicira | Software for network virtualization, rebranded as VMware NSX. Acquired for $1.2 billion. Nicira was founded in 2007 by Martin Casado, Nick McKeown and Scott Shenker. | ||
| Virsto | |||
| Desktone | Desktop-as-a-service provider | ||
| AirWatch and Wandering WiFi | System for managing the security, audit and configuration of mobile devices in enterprises. Acquired for. | ||
| ThirdSky | ITIL/ITSM Consulting. | ||
| CloudVolumes | Real-time application delivery and virtualization to virtual desktop infrastructure | ||
| Continuent | Database clustering and replication software | ||
| October 2014 | MomentumSI | Austin, Texas–based professional services firm specializing in cloud migration and DevOps expertise | |
| June 13, 2016 | Arkin Net | Network Insight - Discover, Optimize and Troubleshoot App Security and Network Connectivity | |
| April 12, 2017 | Wavefront | Cloud-based metrics and monitoring | |
| May 15, 2017 | Apteligent | Mobile application performance. | |
| December 12, 2017 | VeloCloud Networks | Software-defined wide area network. | |
| February 18, 2018 | CloudCoreo | Cloud configuration-management | |
| February 22, 2018 | CloudVelox | Hybrid cloud automation and orchestration software | |
| March 28, 2018 | E8 Security | Software for protecting employee devices from online threats. | |
| May 14, 2018 | Bracket Computing | Security virtualization technology. | |
| August 27, 2018 | CloudHealth Technologies | Cloud cost, usage, security, and governance management platform. | |
| Nov 6, 2018 | Heptio | Kubernetes Software and Services. | |
| February 2019 | Aetherpal | Remote support capabilities for the Workspace ONE platform. | |
| May 15, 2019 | BitRock | Cross platform installer creation tool. | |
| July 2019 | Avi Networks | Cloud application services, including Load Balancer, WAF, and Service Mesh. | |
| July 18, 2019 | Bitfusion | computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning. | |
| August 20, 2019 | Intrinsic | application and serverless security. | |
| October 8, 2019 | Carbon Black | Cloud-native endpoint security software that is designed to detect malicious behavior and to help prevent malicious files from attacking an organization. | |
| December 30, 2019 | Pivotal Software | Cloud-native platform provider of digital transformation technology and services. | |
| July 31, 2020 | Lastline | Cyber security and breach detection platform provider. | |
| September 29, 2020 | SaltStack | Automation and configuration management software. |