VMware

VMware is a cloud computing and virtualization software provider. It is also one of the first companies to virtualize the x86 architecture. Vmware’s software is supported by Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems. The majority of VMware’s shares are owned by Dell Technologies. Palo Alto-based company announced $8.98 billion in revenue for 2018.

VMware is founded by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Ellen Wang, Edouard Bugnion in 1998. The company didn’t make any public statements during its first year. The official launch was made during the DEMO conference in February of 1999. A few months later, the company released its first product, VMware Workstation. The company became a competitor in the server market in 2001 with two products, VMware GSX Server (hosted) and VMware ESX Server (hostless). VMware released VMware Virtual Center, vMotion, and Virtual SMP in 2003 and added the 64-bit support the following year.

In December of 2003, the company signed an agreement with EMC, now Dell EMC Under the terms of the definitive agreement, EMC acquired the company with $625 million in cash. In August of 2007, EMC sold 15% of its shares to the public via an IPO  and shares that were priced at $29 per share, closed the day at $51. In 2008, the board of directors VMware co-founder, president, and CEO Diane Greene was replaced by Paul Maritz, a former 14-year Microsoft employee. A few months later Diane Greene’s husband, who is also a co-founder and chief scientist of VMware Mendel Rosenblum resigned from the company.

In April of 2011, the company released its open-source Cloud Foundry and a hosted version of the service. Java, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Node.js, and Scala was supported as well as database support for MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Postgres, and RabbitMQ.  Two years later VMware launched IaaS service, vCloud Hybrid Service, which is rebranded as vCloud Air later on. In 2017, VMware sold vCloud Air to OVH. VMware now offers VMware vSphere, VMware ESXi, VMware Fusion, VMware Player, VMware ThinApp, VMware View, and VMware Infrastructure products.