A couple of weeks ago, Forbes wrote that VMware had become the world’s fifth highest-valued software company (behind only Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Adobe). Pretty incredible for a technology category (”virtualization”) whose basic concept / definition (”abstracting the OS and software from the underlying hardware”) … is far beyond the grasp of the typical investor. Nevertheless, yesterday’s trading volume was over 10 million!
VMware’s PR team must be incredibly busy behind the scenes. Beyond the super successful IPO (and countering bearish message board chatter about severe over-valuation), VMware had a series of new product announcements at their event this week, an acquisition of a vendor called Dune, and a series of major new distribution partners. Not to mention rolling out new positioning (”Virtualization: [a] feature of the hardware, not the OS”) to throw salt in Microsoft’s virtualization game. Oh yeah, VMWare also currently has about 1,100 jobs they’re trying to fill …
Google, of course, is the company that comes to mind that had this degree of positive hype at the time of their IPO. What I wonder is to what extent VMware is going to be able to sustain a high degree of attention over time. Infrastructure / systems management is a much tougher subject matter to keep interesting and fresh … I would wager that we probably saw the all-time peak of interest in VMware this week. It’s hard to imagine how the company could achieve a higher level of discussion … the PR team over there really did an amazing job, IMHO.
