Skip to main content

VMware IPO - A Major Success

VMware went public today!

Check out VMW on Google Finance.

Back in October of last year, I wrote an article that noted how VMware, a subsidiary of EMC, was kicking butt as a software company, but the value that they were bringing to EMC shareholders was clearly not being represented in the EMC stock price.

In February of this year, EMC and VMware announced that they would sell about 10% of the company in an IPO to happen this summer. Great minds think alike -- and ours too! I wrote about that here.

VMware pre-sold over $368M of the proposed 10% to Intel Capital and Cisco (see these articles).

For the IPO today, VMware priced at $29.00 and opened at $50.00. Near the closing bell, I took this snapshot:


Up 84.83% is what you call a successful IPO.

No wonder. IDC estimates the virtualization market at $20B by 2011. VMware is currently at $1.2B. Do the math on that. There's definitely plenty of upside for companies in the virtualization space. (Disclosure: I am a founder and shareholder of Cassatt Corporation, a company that sells virtualization management software for large data centers; I am now also a customer and shareholder of VMware).

When I wrote my original article, EMC stock was selling for about $12/share, and had been largely flat for years. Yesterday, EMC stock was selling for about $19/share. That's over a 50% rise in share price in under a year. A key kicker of that rise in share price was, indeed, the VMware IPO. Well done EMC! Your stock has finally moved and you are delivering shareholder value from your most excellent VMware asset.

Finally, Intel Capital and Cisco have more than doubled their Net Asset Value of their VMware investment in just a handful of weeks. Honestly, that was a lot faster than I had predicted. They should expect a little extra something in their holiday bonus this year.

Go VMW!

Tags: , , , , , ,

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Bill Coleman Joins 3tera Advisory Board

I think this move surprised a number of people, since Bill recently wrapped up Cassatt Corproation, getting the technology and people  acquired by Computer Associates . However, I was not surprised at all. The announcement, via  3tera Welcomes Bill Coleman : You may or may not have seen the recent press realease.  Bill Coleman, IT/Silicon Valley luminary, Founder and CEO of BEA Systems, has joined 3Tera’s Advisory Board. Yes, this alone is a great testimonial to what we have accomplished in our field.  Getting dignitaries such as Bill does not come easy.  But here’s the best part - this has a lot more than just marquee value and I doubt that Bill would have joined us if that was the case.  Bill, especially since his most recent stint as Founder and CEO of Cassatt Systems, is an extremely knowledgeable visionary in the area of utility and Cloud Computing; and, data center automation. So, Bill will be extremely valuable, reviewing and tweaking both our business plans and techno

Big In Japan Open Sources Their Ruby On Rails Tools

The kind folks over at Big In Japan have graciously decided to Open Source the code they used to build their demo web sites . It's all Ruby on Rails code, and it's being released with a GPL license. The code trees being made available include: elfURL ~ URL Shortner FeedVault ~ OPML file storage FrankenFeed ~ RSS feed merger InstantFeed ~ RSS feeds via email QwikPing ~ Ping Server SocialMail ~ RSS via email Very cool. I just love the Open Source community . I have actually been writing some code of late, and it's great to have some reference code to check out. Not sure if I'm going to go with Ruby on Rails yet, however. And, for the record. I have no idea if this is big in Japan. Tags: Open Source , GPL , Ruby On Rails , Big In Japan , Brian Berliner , brianberliner

CA Acquires 3Tera – It’s About Time!

I started tracking 3Tera in August 2005. They made some amazing progress with their AppLogic release in the next 12 months and things were really starting to look good, so I wrote my first article about them in September 2006 . A couple weeks later, ReadWriteWeb called them out as well . Time passed. 3Tera was early. The market was maturing. Keep pounding away at it… Meanwhile, Cassatt Corporation, the company I co-founded in April 2003 with Bill Coleman and Dave McAlister, sold its technology assets and people to Computer Associates in June 2009 . The Cassatt team was all over scalable “cloud” computing architectures and the management thereof. CA’s acquisition, combined with some of their other aggressive moves in this space (the similar acquisitions of NetQoS, Oblicore, Orchestria, Platinum Technology, and Netreon) made it clear that CA saw some white-space for them to expand into cloud management in a big way. Next, I reported how Bill Coleman joined up with 3Tera as