VMWare announced that their 2008 revenue growth outlook would be "modestly below" its earlier stated target of 50% and that CEO and founder Diane Greene would be resigning immediately. That double whammy sent VMWare stock tumbling by more than 25%.
VMWare appears to have increased competition, not only from Microsoft's recently released near final Hyper-V technology, but also from open source variants from Red Hat, Citrix, Sun and others based on the Xen hypervisor virtual machine monitor. All of these choices are pretty much free, which will be a tough price for VMWare to match.
In an odd twist of fate, the man brought in to fix VMWare is none other than ex-Microsoft heavy weight Paul Maritz who eariler this year sold his company to EMC, VMWare's parent company.
Diane Greene built a tremendously successful company with VMWare, but I'm not sure what strategy I would recommend to her or to Paul Maritz in order to stave off disruption from free competitors. Even with 85% market share, it's a tough position to be in when your business is being disrupted.
Posted by Zack Urlocker on July 9, 2008 07:10 AM
