The stock market was taking a severe beating today except I notice that VMware (VMW) was trading over $100 per share for an increase today of around 2% when I checked and started this post. I found that to be interesting and starting looking for a possible reason why.
VMware has been very busy lately and continues to grow financially year after year. At the end of the first quarter of 2011 VMware’s revenue was up 33% already. This leaves VMware with somewhere around $1.3 billion in cash to help broaden its overall appeal to investors as well as to market VMware’s vision of the cloud.
It is no secret that VMware’s future is cloud computing and VMware has made some recent acquisitions to spur up the different Cloud based solutions that VMware will be able to offer its customers. Currently, VMware is still building up cloud enabling technologies while simultaneously aiding in the build out of large scale clouds with service and technology providers.
Let’s look at some of the recent news and Cloud Products from VMware:
- Zimbra: An email and calendar service with the intent to compete with Microsoft Exchange Server. Zimbra Collaboration Service will also provide document storage and editing and instant messaging.
- SlideRocket: Presentation Service and Online Presentations from the Cloud to be direct competition with Microsoft’s Power Point. For collaboration of the creation of presentations, this service will be wonderful but when you show up to give a presentation I have to admit that relying completely on the internet for my presentation would really makes me nervous.
- SocialCast: Providing Social Collaboration Service to enable modern business communication and collaboration via the cloud and collaborative communities.
- Shavlik: Cloud based IT management solutions for small and medium businesses which will provide a portfolio of on-premise and SaaS-based management solutions to enable the SMB’s to more effectively manage, monitor and secure the environment.
- Horizon App Manager: Although this is a new release and not an acquisition, Project Horizon is a cloud-based management service to give end users access to SaaS and Web applications across different devices while remaining in compliance via policy-driven management.
- Capital Markets Community Cloud was announced which is a first community cloud for the financial space, which provides member traders an equal footing within the NYSE and soon the London Stock Exchange which could be the major reason the stock did so well yesterday.
Besides the acquisitions, research and development and innovation continues to grow more and there should be more cloud offerings on the horizon and I expect at least a few more things to be announced before VMworld 2011.