Lionel Sujay Vailshery
Research expert covering cloud computing and emerging tech industries
VMware - statistics & facts
A tale of innovation, acquisition, and rebirth, VMware's story is a testament to the dynamic nature of the tech industry. As the first company to successfully commercialize the virtualization of the x86 microprocessor architecture, VMware is the market leader in the virtualization market, offering application software solutions that can run independently of the underlying hardware. Founded in 1998 in Palo Alto, California, the cloud computing and virtualization company is now 23 years old. After being acquired by EMC and Dell Technologies, Dell purchased EMC, and VMware was spun off from Dell in November 2021, enjoying a brief period of independence until 2023.
VMware's offerings
VMware's virtualization solutions, most notably the hypervisors, allow customers to run applications on their own operating systems on the same physical server and enable more efficient use of computer hardware. It is being widely adopted in the cloud computing space: cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM all have partnerships with VMware, allowing their customers to run VMware workloads natively on their cloud. VMware's virtualization tools are now a crucial part of many businesses’ IT infrastructure.
VMware's businesses segments
VMware's businesses are divided into three major segments: Licenses, Subscription and SaaS, and Services. The Services segment brings in the most revenue, amounting to over 6.5 billion U.S. dollars in the company's 2023 fiscal year. VMware's more traditional software licensing businesses are slowly giving way to cloud-based product offerings, with its Licenses segment recording a revenue decrease in the latest fiscal year, whereas the Subscription and SaaS segments have been rapidly growing. Over the years, the company's total revenue has slowly increased, peaking at 13.4 billion U.S. dollars in the fiscal year 2023.
Competition and acquisition
VMware's vSphere/vCenter is one of the most adopted virtualization technologies, with a share of 36 percent in 2024. Microsoft's Azure stack, with a share of almost 38 percent, was VMware's biggest competitor. As the cloud market evolves, Broadcom announced its plans to acquire VMware for 61 billion U.S. dollars in May 2022. This deal faced several setbacks as regulators in both Europe and the United States probe the impact of this deal on the growing cloud market. Finally, in November 2023, integrated circuit (IC) design company Broadcom officially marked its entry into the cloud market with the acquisition of VMware.
