The Decisions that VMware made

VMware was one of the great IT successes, but their journey from start-up to behemoth was fraught with decisions that led to the Broadcom acquisition. How did they get here?

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SHOW NOTES:

• EMC acquires VMware for $625M (2004)
• VMware’s 1st IPO (2007)
• History of VMware acquisitions
• Diane Greene replaced by Paul Maritz as CEO (2008)
• VMware revenue history (2005-2022)
• VMware acquires Nicira (2012)
• Pat Gelsinger named CEO (2012)
• VMware launches VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (2013)
• VMware launches vSAN hyper converged (2013)
• VMware acquires Airwatch (2014)
• VMware on AWS cloud service announced at AWS re:Invent (2016)

HOW MUCH VMWARE COULD CONTROL MAKE NEVER TRULY BE KNOWN

• VMware was acquired by EMC in 2004, and operated as an “independent” entity, but how independent was it really?
• What might VMware have become if they weren’t owned by an infrastructure company?

HOW TO FOCUS ON CHANGES, ADDITIONS, AND SUBTRACTIONS

• What happens if VMware is allowed to be spun out from EMC? How much did it impact growth? How much did it impact innovation?
• What happens if Paul Maritz doesn’t acquire all the companies that tried to become Microsoft? 
• What happens if VMware didn’t spinout Pivotal, and instead delivered a more vertical software stack?
• What happens if Pat Gelsinger doesn’t buy Nicira, and instead focuses on the public cloud offerings 4 years earlier? (AWS revenues by year)
• Why didn’t VMware define the integrated computing model (e.g. Cisco UCS)? 
• What happens if VMware (or Pivotal) had adopted Kubernetes in 2015 instead of 2019? 

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