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Virtualization market reinvigorates

It indeed has come of age and like I have said, it is just the beginning!

It was only nine years ago that Diane Greene and her husband helped found VMware, a startup with the idea of taking the concept of hardware virtualization that was commonplace in high-end servers and mainframes and bringing it to the rapidly expanding x86 marketplace.

Fast-forward to 2007, and VMware is the leader in one of the fastest-growing segments of the technology industry, with rivals large and small looking to knock off the king. Recently, the Palo Alto, Calif., company was in the middle of a wild week that saw the virtualization space rapidly reshape itself.

On Aug. 14, VMware, owned by storage giant EMC since 2004, launched its much-anticipated IPO (initial public offering) and saw shares on the first day almost double in price, with officials hoping to raise more than $900 million in capital.

A day later, Citrix Systems announced plans to buy open-source virtualization vendor XenSource for $500 million, a move that could have further ramifications given both companies' close ties to Microsoft, which is developing its own virtualization hypervisor, dubbed Viridian.


Read EWeek.

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