History[edit]

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.[8] Edouard Bugnion remained the chief architect and CTO of VMware until 2005,
[9]

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 byChris Shipley.
[10]

The first product, VMware Workstation, was delivered in May 1999,[11] and the company entered

the server market in 2001 with VMware GSX Server (hosted) and VMware ESX Server (hostless). [12]
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.[13]
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.[14]
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 computingbusiness unit.[15] 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. [16]
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.[17]
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.[18] 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),[19] 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]