[parasubvert]

VMware has several billion-dollar or more businesses...

- the core vSphere hypervisor and management software

- Vmware Cloud on AWS which is pretty big on its own, plus other cloudy things like datrium / disaster recovery as a service.

- cybersecurity (carbon black and secure state), which is similar to what Symantec does, will be an interesting overlap

- endpoint management (security for desktops, mobile) which was AirWatch

- management (monitoring & automation) aka. vRealize and Cloud Health

- workspace / single sign on, similar to okta (Workspace ONE)

- virtual desktops (Horizon) which compete with Citrix

- software defined networking (NSX) which competes with F5, Cisco, Juniper etc.

- modern apps (Tanzu) which is largely open source... containers & developer tools & data services & agile consulting, e.g. Spring, Apache Tomcat, RabbitMQ, Greenplum, Wavefront, Bitnami / Kubeapps, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry and Pivotal Labs (now Tanzu Labs)

[rsync]

Fascinating … your very comprehensive list does not contain the only VMware products I have ever cared about: workstation and fusion.

[TMWNN]

You run a well-known online backup company and I don't, but my reaction was exactly the same: The only VMware products I've ever cared about are Workstation and Fusion, neither of which is on the list.

On the one hand, it's pretty cool that VMware has pivoted so successfully over the past 15 years from being solely focused on a hypervisor (or, I suppose in modern terminology, "self-hosted cloud") business that the cloud largely supplanted. On the other hand, it's sad for someone like me, who used Workstation to run VMs at home (I moved to VirtualBox), and have thought at times about spinning up ESXi.

[edgyquant]

> a well-known online backup company and I don't

What’s up with this? Did their company steal the name of the tool rsync?

[rsync]

In early 2006 I asked the original author and the current maintainer for their blessing to use the domain "rsync.net" for (re)incorporating the offsite backup component of the ISP I started in 2001[1].

I gave them right of first refusal, etc., and they said my use of "rsync.net" as the name of the company, domain name, etc., was acceptable.

[1] "JohnCompanies"

[fuy]

their main business for two decades has been datacenter virtualization. Individual developers don't care about it, sure, but it's a huge software business.

[maire]

Workstation and fusion were never big money makers. They were more of a labor of love.

I joined VMware just after the release of Businessware 2.0 - which I agree was 14 years ago.

The big money maker was vmotion because it allowed datacenters to decouple the server from the underlying hardware. Ever after, the money was in the datacenter products.

[maire]

correction: VSphere 2.0 not Businessware 2.0 (wrong company).

For some reason I could not edit my post so I had to reply to my post.

[walterbell]

A few years ago, most of the US dev team for workstation was laid off in favor of a non-US team.

[parasubvert]

good point… I don’t think they’re billion dollar businesses though. Probably hundreds of millions? Hard to say as I don’t think VMware publishes this info

[IshKebab]

And has a lot of "similar to {thing I have actually heard of}"

[TMWNN]

It reminds me of the first episode of Saturday Night Live after the original 1975 cast all left. In the first episode, the new cast did a sketch in which they each described themselves as a version/variant of/similar to a member of the old cast.

(Everyone was fired after that season, except for Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo.)

[manwe150]

I think both of those are free now for consumer usage, for at least a couple years now?

[reiichiroh]

No not the Pro versions still

[0x0000000]

You covered SDN but they are also the leading SD-WAN vendor through their VeloCloud acquisition 7ish years ago. Workspace 1 is also the core for their SASE products (zero trust network access, secure web gateways, browser isolation etc) when tied with VeloCloud.

[parasubvert]

Yep I forgot about VeloCloud and SASE. It really is a beast of a company :-)