The subsidiary contributed revenue of $47.2m to Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based EMC’s revenue in the second quarter, up from $39.3m in the first quarter, and a 200% rise on the same quarter last year.
VMware is set to benefit from the increased research and development and marketing muscle of its parent, and has added 180 staff since the acquisition closed, but president Diane Greene told ComputerWire that VMware continues to be profitable and fund its own growth.
While the acquisition by EMC might have added some extra momentum behind VMware, Greene said the acceptance of server virtualization has been more significant. The market has completely accepted that the virtualization layer is a good thing, she said.
Our products have moved from some production and a lot of testing to mainstream production, she continued. The driver was server consolidation, now people are going beyond server consolidation and realizing deeper value.
According to Greene, the increased adoption of the virtualization model has been triggered mainly by economic arguments, but also for VMware, by its introduction of new virtual machine management technologies. The big key was in October when we launched Virtual Center, she said of the company’s management and provisioning tool. That did more than a magnitude more than we thought it would in the first quarter.
Alongside VirtualCenter came VMotion, which enables virtual machines to be moved around from one physical server to another. This was also a significant release, according to Greene. It’s really key to success when you introduce a brand new way of doing things if you don’t require users to make a major change in infrastructure, she said.
Looking ahead, the company is focusing long-term on the integration of network, storage and server virtualization, and while it is working with EMC on these plans, Greene maintained that VMware remains independent. Any storage vendor can drive joint development, everything is firewalled off, she said.
As such, VMware is looking to increase its partnerships with network and storage vendors to enable the provisioning of virtual machines across all three domains. You get a lot of the benefits from the virtualization layer, she said. Better partnering will bring it together.
While a lot of the virtualization focus is on the server side, VMware is also not forgetting about its desktop heritage and the VMware Workstation product with which it began. A major desktop announcement is scheduled for next month.
