Who owns VMware?

VMware is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company. It was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

VMware also has an enterprise software hypervisor for servers that is a bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on server hardware without requiring an additional underlying operating system.

VMware was founded in 1998 by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Ellen Wang, and Edouard Bugnion. For the first year, VMware operated with roughly 20 employees and did not officially launch until its second year in 1999 at the DEMO Conference.

The first product was the VMware workstation in 1999, and the company entered the server market shortly thereafter in 2001 with VMware GSX Server and VMware ESX Server. In 2003, VMware launched VMware Virtual Center, vMotion, and Virtual SMP technology.

In January 2004, Dell EMC acquired VMware for $625 million. In August 2007, Dell EMC sold 15% of VMware to the public through an initial public offering. In May 2022, it was announced that Broadcom would acquire VMware for approximately $61 billion in cash and stock. The transaction is expected to be finalized in the fiscal year 2023.