EMC Parts With VMware

February 12, 2007: EMC will part with around ten percent of its VMware subsidiary after announcing an initial public offering (IPO) of VMware stock.

The storage giant was quick to dismiss concerns they were looking to spin off from VMware altogether, by declaring they would keep all remaining shares of the server software maker.

VMware has proven to be quite the worthy investment for EMC with sales increasingly on the upwards. Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC says VMware is one of the fastest-growing software businesses in the history of the industry.

“We expect the IP to unlock more of VMware’s value for EMC shareholders while also strengthening it ability to retain and attract the software industry’s top talent,” said Tucci.

The VMware runs off the back of the virtualisation bandwagon, allowing a single computer to run multiple operating systems simultaneously. Bought by EMC in January 2004, the business has been since run independently, yet as a wholly owned subsidiary.

Analysts put much of VMware’s runaway success down to its ability to save on energy costs in the data centre. Last year, VMware’s sales were up by 83 percent to US$709 million.

Meanwhile IBM has beefed up its virtualisation offerings by announcing new code for supporting and increasing workloads on IBM system z9 and zSeries servers. z/VM for V5.3 provides support to facilitate growth and handle increased usage. IBM says a single z/VM partition can be configured with more than 128 GB of real storage and 32 processor units.

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