VMware

VMware is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was one of the first commercially successful companies to virtualize the x86 architecture, along with the management of x86-based environments across Microsoft Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris x86, and Novell NetWare operating systems. The company operates in a number of segments: licensing, subscriptions, services, and software-as-a-service. It offers solutions for IT infrastructure, application development, and cybersecurity teams.

VMware bases the company's virtualization technology on its bare-metal hypervisor ESX/ESXi in x86 architecture. With the virtualization technology, a hypervisor is installed on a physical server that allows virtual machines to run on the same physical server. Meanwhile, each virtual machine can run its own operating system, allowing multiple operating systems to run on one physical server.

VMware's Workspace ONE is the company's intelligence-driven digital workspace platform capable of being used through an application on any device to give users flexibility. Workspace ONE offers unified endpoint management to help administrators consolidate management silos across mobile devices, desktops, and other devices offering real-time security. As well, through data aggregation and correlation among devices running Workspace ONE, the platform can also drive insights, analytics, and automation of common IT tasks.

The Workspace ONE offers traditional virtual desktop and applications as well, to give users increased flexibility. And the service offers security across devices, users, and applications to simplify the use of zero-trust access control.

Vmware's NSX Firewall is a distributed network architecture service delivered through software to help a user detect and stop threats inside of a network. The NSX Firewall works to cover all blind spots, offering coverage across all traffic flows and workload types with layer-7 distributed firewall and software-only gateway firewall. And it is designed to simplify security operations with an API-driven, object-based policy model and for the automation in policy creation and deployment.

The service is also developed to offer consistent firewall policies across all cloud environments and workload types, through virtualized workloads and to help organizations maintain security policies. And the service offers zero trust architecture to allow multi-cloud and software-based approaches to operationalize and scale security.

The Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) service offered by VMware merges wide area networking, security, and compute through cloud-delivered services to securely connect users and applications across locations. This service combines network security functions with WAN capabilities, offering secure and automated access to applications and workloads in the cloud environment by extending software-defined network to infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service provider.

For Cloud Solutions, VMware offers cloud solutions to help companies digitize and modernize any application and deliver it through the cloud to an organization's customers. This allows organizations to develop clouds and operate across the data center, the edge, and other clouds with VMware Cloud. Users can choose any cloud and deploy applications from the data center; it can support traditional and newer applications with enterprise-grade security, reliability, and resiliency; with the cloud infrastructure offering users to accelerate application delivery from the cloud; and it allows an organization to offer consistent security through the cloud operations and security across any cloud or software stack.

VMware was founded in 1998 by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, and Edouard Bugnion. In May 1999, the company developed its first product, the VMware Workstation, and would enter the server market two years later with its VMware GSX Server, a hosted solution, and VMware ESX Server, a hostless solution.

On January 9, 2004, under the terms of a definitive agreement announced the month previous, EMC acquired VMware for $625 million in cash. In 2016, EMC was acquired by Dell Technologies and was renamed to Dell EMC. Three years later, in 2007, EMC sold 15 percent of VMware to the public through an initial public offering, with shares beginning that day at $29 per share and closing at $51 per share.

In April 2021, it was reported that Dell planned to spin-off the company's remaining stake in VMware to shareholders. As part of this deal, Dell and VMware announced that they would continue to operate as they had, without major changes, for the next five years, which was especially important for VMware as 35 percent of the company's sales came from Dell. The transaction was pitched as reducing the complexity between Dell EMC and VMware, with the spin off allowing VMware to compete more aggressively with a simplified corporate structure.

After the spin-off, which was completed in November 2021, Dell CEO Michael Dell and private equity partner Silver Lake Partners retained approximately 41 percent of VMware, with Silver Lake holding an approximate 11 percent stake in VMware, meaning Michael Dell and partner own an approximate 52 percent of VMware.