VMware is becoming a big boy now, a very big boy. Two billion is a big number.
$2,000,000,000
Two thousand million.
or better, for the geek inclined, and to make it look really big, how about in binary, appropriate for a technology company:
2 000 000 000.00 = 0b1110111001101011001010000000000
I used google calculator to do that conversion. notice the 'b', it gave up. Can't find many calculators that do binary to the billions, must be a big number.When I started working with VMware in 2003, they were not a big company relative to today. I think revenues were in the $150M range or so. There were maybe a couple hundred employees. Certainly a respectable size for a software company, but no Oracle/Microsoft/Symantec/CA/Citrix competitor. I admit that I fell in love with the technology at the time and became quite an evangelist for them.
I remember going to a partner conference for Citrix in Feb 2004. Mark Templeton, Citrix CEO, gave a big rah rah speech and spoke about how the vision of the company was to become a $1,000,000,000 (1 billion) dollar company. Citrix had been around for nearly 15 years at that point had achieved revenues of nearly $600,000,000 (600 million duckets). As a partner I didn't care a bit for that vision, but whatever, if it gets Citrix excited, sure. They almost made it by the end of 2005 with $900M, and overachieved in 2006 with $1.2B. It took them over 16 years to get there. And the last push was driven solely by revenue from many acquisitions, if you remember, Citrix was on the acquisition warpath for several years. They had to get away from being the one trick remote access pony to becoming a total platform of sorts.
VMware has followed a similar path, but has done it twice as fast, with broader adoption and acceptance marketwide in my opinion than Citrix has ever been. Many of the loyal Citrix fanboys all changed religion to VMware, in fact many of the VMware SEs in the early days were Citrix turncoats.
So a little rambling today to say to VMware "CONGRATULATIONS". And an even bigger congratulations to EMC, who really gets to enjoy the financial success of VMware. Citrix grew to a mega-software company by acquiring companies to get there. VMware did that too, but achieved the biggest momentum push from being acquired by EMC in 2004.
I still believe that the EMC acquisition is the single largest factor that accelerated VMware's growth. Certainly VMware had fantastic products, genius level engineers and was one of the most innovative companies at the time. But none of that was getting recognized by the market at large. As a guy that was on the street evangelizing the message at the time, take it from me, I saw it first hand. The technophiles were passionately in love with the technology, but Joe Customer had other things to do than take a risk by running his servers in these "virtual-whatever-they-are's". Post EMC acquisition in 2004, VMware became a household name overnight. The EMC machine for lighting up a worldwide campaign that drives brand recognition, credibility, distribution and anything else needed to grow was all VMware lacked to hit it big.
And hit it big they have. $2B in revenue and $200M of that is pure profit. Smartest $625M EMC ever spent.
Perspective
---> If I could put things in perspective however...VMware/Citrix/EMC and the rest of them have labored and toiled for many years to become billion dollar software giants. And with the wave of a magic goverment issued pen, our weasely elected officials spend that away as if it fell out of the sky from a money fairy. A billion dollars appears as a larger than life number when you are a startup company dreaming of becoming what Citrix and VMware have become. It is a nearly insurmountable goal. As a bureaucrat, who has likely barely balanced a checkbook in their lifetime personally, a billion dollars is something that gets spent as a minor earmark to some other piece of legislation. It's not enough to even upset lunch at the Press Club with. Wave it away....gggrrrrr.....we work too hard for that type of disconnected leadership....
-dave
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