update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information . march 2016 vmware inc. campus headquarters palo alto california type public traded as nyse vmw industry computer software founded october 26 1998 ; 17 years ago 1998 10 26 palo alto california u.s. founder diane greene mendel rosenblum scott devine ellen wang edouard bugnion headquarters palo alto california u.s. products vsphere esx esxi workstation fusion player server vmware service manager thinapp view ace lab manager infrastructure converter site recovery manager stage manager vrealize automation vrealize operations management suite vmware nsx vrealize business revenue us 6.035 billion 2014 operating income us 1.027 billion 2014 net income us 0.86 billion 2014 total assets us 15.216 billion 2014 total equity us 7.586 billion 2014 number of employees 18 000 1 december 31 2014 parent dell technologies website www.vmware.com vmware inc. is a subsidiary of dell technologies that provides cloud and virtualization software and services 2 3 4 and claims to be the first to successfully virtualize the x86 architecture commercially . 5 founded in 1998 vmware is based in palo alto california . in 2004 it was acquired by and became a subsidiary of emc corporation then on august 14 2007 emc sold 15 % of the company in a new york stock exchange ipo . the company trades under the symbol vmw . 6 vmware s desktop software runs on microsoft windows linux and mac os x while its enterprise software hypervisors for servers vmware esx and vmware esxi are bare metal hypervisors that run directly on server hardware without requiring an additional underlying operating system . 7 in anticipation of dell s acquisition of parent company emc vmware announced a restructuring in january 2016 to reduce about 800 positions and some executives resigned . 8 9 10 11 12 there were doubts about the company s future and its product lines particularly for the desktop . in august 2016 announcing the release of new desktop products the company said we re very much alive and well . 13 contents 1 history 1.1 acquisitions 1.2 litigation 2 core product design 3 products 3.1 desktop software 3.2 server software 3.3 cloud management software 3.4 public cloud 3.5 virtual desktop infrastructure 3.6 application management 3.7 storage management 3.8 backup software 3.9 networking and security products 3.10 other products 4 see also 5 references 6 external links history edit in 1998 vmware was founded by diane greene mendel rosenblum scott devine ellen wang and edouard bugnion . greene and rosenblum who are married first met while at the university of california berkeley . 14 edouard bugnion remained the chief architect and cto of vmware until 2005 15 and went on to found nuova systems now part of cisco . for the first year vmware operated in stealth 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 . 16 the first product vmware workstation was delivered in may 1999 17 and the company entered the server market in 2001 with vmware gsx server hosted and vmware esx server hostless . 18 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 . 19 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 us 51 . 20 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 . 21 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 a collaboration with cisco systems . one result was the cisco nexus 1000v a distributed virtual software switch an integrated option in the vmware infrastructure . 22 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 . 23 in march 2013 vmware gave details of a 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 . 24 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 . citation needed in april 2013 pivotal was formally created with ge as a minority shareholder . citation needed in may 2013 vmware launched vcloud hybrid service at its new palo alto headquarters vcloud hybrid service now known as vcloud air 25 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 . citation needed 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 . citation needed following the news in early 2016 of the impending acquisition by dell and despite dell s assurance that vmware would remain independent 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 for 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 ; 26 vmware ceo pat gelsinger following rumours categorically denied that he would leave . 27 11 acquisitions edit date company notes 000000002005 10 01 0000october 2005 asset optimization group specialized in capacity planning . 28 000000002 006 06 01 0000june 2006 akimbi systems specialized in lab management . 29 000000002 007 09 01 0000september 2007 dunes technologies vmware acquired the swiss company for an undisclosed sum . 30 000000002 008 07 01 0000july 2008 b hive networks vmware acquired the israeli 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 . 31 000000002 008 10 01 0000october 2008 trango virtual processors was a grenoble based mobile hypervisor developer . 32 000000002 008 11 26 0000november 26 2008 tungsten graphics core expertise in 3d graphics driver development . 33 000000002 009 08 10 0000august 10 2009 springsource performed enterprise and web application development and management . 34 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 . 35 the springsource assets became part of the pivotal joint venture in april 2013 . 000000002010 01 12 0000january 12 2010 zimbra software designed for open source collaboration it was bought from yahoo and later sold in july 2013 to telligent systems . citation needed 000000002010 05 06 0000may 6 2010 gemstone incorporated into vmware s springsource division . citation needed 000000002011 04 26 0000april 26 2011 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 . citation needed 000000002011 08 01 0000august 2011 packetmotion user activity monitoring startup . their packetsentry product was planned to be incorporated into vmware vcloud networking and security 36 but then it was eosl d by the end of 2012 . 37 000000002 012 05 22 0000may 22 2012 wanova 38 000000002 012 07 02 0000july 2 2012 dynamicops 39 000000002 012 07 23 0000july 23 2012 nicira software for network virtualization which was later included in the vmware nsx product . 40 41 the deal was valued at over 1.2 billion . 42 000000002 013 02 11 0000february 11 2013 virsto 43 000000002 013 10 15 0000october 15 2013 desktone 44 000000002 014 01 22 0000january 22 2014 airwatch and wandering wifi acquired for us 1.54 billion . 45 46 47 000000002 014 03 06 0000march 6 2014 thirdsky itil itsm consulting . 000000002014 08 20 0000august 20 2014 cloudvolumes formerly snapvolumes 48 000000002 014 10 29 0000october 29 2014 continuent 49 litigation edit in march 2015 the software freedom conservancy announced it was funding litigation by christoph hellwig against vmware for violation of his copyrights in its esxi product . the case will be heard in hamburg germany . 50 the sfc claims vmware is using both the linux kernel and busybox without respecting the terms of the gpl copyright license while vmware told journalists that it believed the case was without merit 51 and expressed disappointment that conservancy had resorted to litigation . 52 core product design edit vmware developed a range of products most notable of which are their hypervisors . vmware became well known for their first type 2 hypervisor known as gsx . this product has since evolved into two hypervisor products lines vmware s type 1 hypervisors running directly on hardware and their hosted type 2 hypervisors . vmware software provides a completely virtualized set of hardware to the guest operating system . 53 vmware software virtualizes the hardware for a video adapter a network adapter and hard disk adapters . the host provides pass through drivers for guest usb serial and parallel devices . in this way vmware virtual machines become highly portable between computers because every host looks nearly identical to the guest . in practice a system administrator can pause operations on a virtual machine guest move or copy that guest to another physical computer and there resume execution exactly at the point of suspension . alternatively for enterprise servers a feature called vmotion allows the migration of operational guest virtual machines between similar but separate hardware hosts sharing the same storage or with vmotion storage separate storage can be used too . each of these transitions is completely transparent to any users on the virtual machine at the time it is being migrated . vmware workstation server and esx take a more optimized path to running target operating systems on the host than that of emulators such as bochs which simulate the function of each cpu instruction on the target machine one by one or that of dynamic recompilation which compiles blocks of machine instructions the first time they execute and then uses the translated code directly when the code runs subsequently microsoft virtual pc for mac os x takes this approach . vmware software does not emulate an instruction set for different hardware not physically present . this significantly boosts performance but can