Intel Invests $218M in VMWare, Preparing for IPO

RulerOf writes "TechNewsWorld is carrying an article detailing that Intel has made an investment in VMWare for $218.5 million in anticipation of VMWare's imminent IPO. With an expected value of $23-25 a share, VMWare's IPO shows a value of $950 million. This investment brings Intel to an approximately 13% ownership of the EMC subsidiary, and helps to strengthen ties between the two companies. According to the article, 'VMware's virtualization platform runs on Intel architecture and most deployments of the tools are on systems using Intel chips.'"

Comments

What does this hold for AMD

[grc]

I wonder what the impact of this investment will be for AMD. I would hope VMWare will still support AMDs hardware virtualization architecture, and not just Intels...

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[ZachMG]

considering that with bootcamp the mac people don't need it anymore that means that its market base will move away from the intel macs and more into the windows base, so ya that would suck monkey balls

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[teh_chrizzle]

*looks over shoulder at opteron box running VMWare server*

my friend and i were wondering the same thing.

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[Constantine XVI]

Well, considering that VMWare has been rushing to put together a Mac VMWare long since Bootcamp came out...
VMWare has always been targeting the Linux and Windows server markets. Abandoning AMD would be a shotgun to the foot.

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[alen]

AMD and Intel have a cross licensing agreement. AMD can put the same thing on their chips as Intel does to support VMWare

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[jfekendall]

As a guy who has toured their facilities, they seem to push IBM products: specifically Blades. There is no doubt in my mind that there is some bias at the hardware level. But I don't see AMD support going away quite yet. It's really anyone's guess.

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[goombah99]

Not sure if you are joking, but we all know how the intel compilers slow down code for AMDs.

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[WIAKywbfatw]

VMWare has always been targeting the Linux and Windows server markets. Abandoning AMD would be a shotgun to the foot.

If history has taught us one thing it's that you should never underestimate the ability of companies to shoot themselves in the foot.

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[Orange Crush]

Considering AMD has an antitrust lawsuit in progress against Intel in the US, Intel would be wise to avoid writing any "suggestions" in the memo line of that check they just cut for a piece of VMWare.

If VMWare starts optimizing for Intel-specific differences, or even does so much as slapping a "for best results, use Intel(tm) processors!" sticker on the box it's going to look very bad from where the judge is sitting.

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[morgan_greywolf]

Errmmm...I don't follow you. Don't Macs run Intel chips?

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[Constantine XVI]

Yes, but parent was referring to how Mac users don't care about VMWare becasue of bootcamp

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[PalmKiller]

Bootcamp is NOT like vmware...bootcamp is just a boot manager that lets the intel mac reboot into windows...it probably has some bios emulation stuff, but its no vmware. Vmware runs different virtual systems simultaenously....not just one at a time.

From http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

Run Windows natively

Once you've completed Boot Camp, simply hold down the option key (that's the "alt" key for you longtime Windows users) at startup to choose between Mac OS X and Windows. After starting up, your Mac runs Windows natively just like a PC. Simply restart to come back to Mac.

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[Constantine XVI]

I knew that. Parent, OTOH, was completely oblivious.

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[OrangeTide]

VMware will always be committed to providing support for hardware that their customers wish to use. Plenty of VMware's enterprise customers are on AMD64. Also there have been papers published by people, some of them vmware employees, showing the advantaged to AMD's virtualization for memory mapping over Intel's more limited virtualization support.

To be honest most at VMware are not hugely excited with the virtualization extensions. Most of the features are slower than the old techniques using binary extraction/patching. Having to pay for a full exception and context switch back every time you trigger something that needs to be virtualized is costly compared to just scanning the machine code and inserting jumps into a local monitor to do the same thing. avoiding huge switches between different protection rings.

I wish the MMU on x86 was more like IBM's mainframes, it can be costly to migrate the access and dirty bits all the way to the top for every single VM. x86 was simply not designed for virtualization.

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[Amouth]

one of these days they are going to run out of feet.. and have to start on the knee caps

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[nbritton]

Well, considering that VMWare has been rushing to put together a Mac VMWare long since Bootcamp came out...

You are clueless... http://www.parallels.com/products/coherence/

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[Constantine XVI]

If you read my parent post, you would have noticed he said that Bootcamp rendered VMWare useless. VMWare presumably started (public) work on Fusion after Bootcamp was out. Coherence is a competitor to Fusion, but I was responding to the parent's claims that Bootcamp replaces VMWare, not Coherence coming out first or any other competitors.

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[fm6]

Whose facility? VMware's? Nonsense. They're hardware vendor-agnostic. They have to be. They were probably just qualifying IBM blades the day you were there.

I work for a company that sells AMD-based servers, both blade and rack-mount. And ESX is darned important product for us.

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[WIAKywbfatw]

one of these days they are going to run out of feet.. and have to start on the knee caps

I think we're past that point. There are more than a few companies out there that seem to have shot themselves in the crotch.

(C.f Enron, Worldcom, Arthur Andersen for recent examples.)

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[jfekendall]

Dude, it was just what they were pushing for an out-of-the-box solution at the time. No reason to jump down my throat over it. It was the facility in Brecksville, Ohio.

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[fm6]

Dude, don't get all defensive because somebody points out a flaw in your logic. We all say stupid shit. The difference between that and being stupid is refusing to admit our mistakes.

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[cbreaker]

We just purchased two quad-socket dual-core opteron machines with 32GB ram to run VMware on.

When you're running a lot of VM's on your hosts, you can go with Intel because they have more marketing power, or you can go with AMD because they perform much better in cpu/memory intensive SMP applications.

Motives?

[tuukkah]

Do I read correctly that they invested $218M and expect to have $130M after the IPO? That smells like some other motive than stock investing...

Re:Motives?

[djaxl]

In the tradition of Slashdot, I didn't RTFA, however I'm guessing Intel purchased shares of the preferred, non-publicly-traded variety.

Re:Motives?

[ergo98]

Do I read correctly that they invested $218M and expect to have $130M after the IPO? That smells like some other motive than stock investing...

EMC is retaining 90% ownership of VMWare, and is IPOing shares representing 10% of the company. That 10% is expected to bring in $949 million, giving the whole company a market capitalization of around $10 billion.

2.5% of $10 billion is around $250 million of course.

From TFA

[Aranykai]

VMware's virtualization platform runs on Intel architecture and most deployments of the tools are on systems using Intel chips. What? It doesn't run on anything else anymore? I wasn't aware that the x86 instruction set was used solely by Intel now.

Re:From TFA

[Neil Watson]

Most of our ESX hosts (about a dozen in total) are AMD chips.

Re:From TFA

[RulerOf]

It's not that VMWare doesn't work on AMD chips, I run VMWare on several AMD's and it works just peachy. What they're getting at is support for a hardware Hypervisor. The hypervisor is that spiffy little bit of logic that keeps track of x86 instructions inside of a CPU and determines which machine, real or virtual, that said intruction belongs to. Traditionally, this has been done in software, but porting that intruction set over to hardware, as Intel has done, and I believe AMD won't be doing until their quad core line comes to market, significantly improves the speed of virtualization to the point where there is no difference between a real OS and a virtualized one (except for multi-OS overhead, of course). That was one of the whole points of that "Blue Pill" idea some months ago.

Re:From TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel has VT
AMD has AMD-V (starting from Socket F Opteron processors)

VMware can make use of both for 64-bit VMs. BT (binary translation) is used for 32-bit VMs since it works faster for VMware.

Re:From TFA

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

I believe AMD won't be doing until their quad core line comes to market

You believe wrong. Pretty much all of AMD's current lineup, from my $59 Athlon 64 X2 3600+ to the high-end Opterons, supports AMD-V, which is roughly analagous to Intel's VT. I have even heard from some sources that AMD-V is superior to VT.

Intel AMD

[jshriverWVU]

I read this a day or so ago and it's interesting. Ignoring the whole money transaction the partnering is interesting. Intel is interested because they'll have an inside connection to designing their processors to be better adapted toward virtualization. On the flip side VMware will get to better turn their software to the architecture. It's a win-win situation.

My only hope is that Intel doesn't skew it's architecture so much that it becomes incompatible and that AMD is left behind. Would be nice if AMD could partner up as well, or create a consortium for "next gen architecture and virtualization enhancements" kinda like how MMX, SSE etc came about for graphics.

Re:Intel AMD

[fm6]

My only hope is that Intel doesn't skew it's architecture so much that it becomes incompatible and that AMD is left behind.

Perhaps that's precisely what Intel has in mind. For many years now, Intel's ability to set prices has been limited mainly by the fear of losing market share to AMD. Surely Intel would love to have a technology that AMD can't copy.

Re:Intel AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

partner up ... kinda like how MMX, SSE etc came about for graphics?

or did you mean like how amd sued intel, then intel countersued amd, they both settled with patent cross license agreements and had full access to the tech?

Re:Intel AMD

[Richard W.M. Jones]

My only hope is that Intel doesn't skew it's architecture so much that it becomes incompatible and that AMD is left behind. Would be nice if AMD could partner up as well, or create a consortium for "next gen architecture and virtualization enhancements" kinda like how MMX, SSE etc came about for graphics.

Too late - it's already happened. Intel and AMD have incompatible virtualisation technologies. Intel's is called VT with various sub-designations such as VT-d for virtualising DMA. AMD's is called AMD-V and is completely different. AMD have sub-divisions too, such as support for Nested Page Tables which Intel are still developing.

Xen supports both. Not certain about VMWare, but I'd be surprised if they didn't support both too. One interesting fact is that hardware virtualisation isn't faster than software approaches like VMWare's emulation or Xen paravirtualisation. Although this will probably change in future (and also Xen paravirt is no good for you if you want to run Windoze or other binary-only OSes).

Rich.

Re:Intel AMD

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Found a link to an article on AMD's Nested Page Tables.

Rich.

Re:Intel AMD

[flappinbooger]

Didn't Intel do a "skew" some time ago called Itanium? That didn't go so well.

I have a hunch that the market likes compatible choices, any wide variation from "the path" will whither and die.

IOW, AMD copies the good stuff, Intel copies the good stuff, and the goofy stuff doesn't make it or is niche. (my 0.0147 euros)

Re:Intel AMD

[fm6]

Itanium's big issue was backward compatibility with Intel's own legacy x86 chips. That's a lot different from not being compatible with a competitor's chips — especially one that has maybe 10% of the market.

Not 13%

[crow]

The IPO is only for about 10% of the company, and Intel has pre-purchased about a quarter of that stock, so that would be about 2.5% of the new VMWare that Intel will own. Or at least that's what all the other reports are suggesting.

[Disclaimer: I work for EMC, but have no connection to VMWare; I have no inside knowledge of the IPO or related transactions.]

Re:Not 13%

[superid]

re: your disclaimer.... I have a friend of a friend (no really!) that works in the toronto office. I mentioned something about the EMC/VM merger and he said "yeah, they come over and steal our bagels"

Re:Not 13%

[fm6]

The news reports I've seen say that Intel's stake in VMware is in addition to the 10% stake that had already been announced. So EMC is indeed selling off 13% of VMware, or close to it.

Re:Not 13%

[crow]

I've heard conflicting information on whether the 3% is part of the already announced 10% or not. As an EMC shareholder, I would prefer to keep more of it for EMC.

Of course, my impression is that what Intel really gets out of this is a seat on the board. Of course, getting to invest in a highly-anticipated IPO at the low end of the expected IPO price is a sweet deal. I don't see what's in it for EMC (though it does add to the hype for the IPO, which isn't bad).

Re:Not 13%

[fm6]

It's sort of like a monarch sending off one of his daughters to marry another monarch who's a potential adversary or ally. It cements relationships between the two companies. After all, both EMC and VMware need Intel's good will.

It may be $950m to them

[Anonymous Coward]

But it would be a 19,000 day supply of hookers and cocaine for bender.

Pfft. I'm not impressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've dealt directly with the folks at VMware, and I have to say that I'm just not impressed. I love the product, when it works. But lately I've had difficulty with being able to run VMware on some of the more modern OS's. The workstation in particular, with Fedora and Centos, I had to jump through hoops (and even then had trouble). The server was far better for Centos. But still, the Linux compatibility is something that I'd expect better from the folks at VMware; especially since they seem to have rather high, self-inflated opinions of themselves here.

Another main tool that I use is to judge a company is in how they handle contractors. In short, they are stll quite clueless. Contractors tend to do a lot of key work (in some companies, it is all the real work which gets done). A few years ago, they weren't hanlding contractors at all. This year, I got a call from them, and while I'm sure the manager thought otherwise, I could tell that they were feeding me a bunch of B.S..

For one thing, they were completely unable to move fast. Quality talent is hard to find in Silicon Valley these days (I know, as I'm in the process of trying to hire top talent myself). It was going to take VMware two weeks(!) just to line up the interviews. Excuse me, but while you can get away with this for fulltime people, it doesn't cut it with contractors. For a contractor, down time is unpaid time; and I'm not going to sit around waiting for anyone to push through the red tape. Things move fast for me, and in two weeks I can find a new gig starting completely from scratch (4 weeks tops, and that was during the dot-com bust).

Then there was other BS about having to work your way up, yadda yadda. Excuse me, but I've been hacking kernels longer than many folks have been alive. I'm a contractor, not an employee; nor do I want to go fulltime. You bring contractors in to do a job, get it done, and get out. "Working up" is for employees.

Oh yes, and then he had the gall to say that they didn't really like contractors. Well, nobody likes to pay contractor rates. But that's a really excellent way to alienate people. I appreciate the honesty though, and will avoid VMware in the future. So basically I told them to piss off (not in those words; as a contractor you learn to be far more diplomatic).

In short, I came away with the impression that VMware thinks they are so hot that they can afford to dink around and pull people's chains. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. It might have in 2003. But not now. And especially since there are 50,000 H1-B's who are going to be leaving this year.

So, in short, I'm not impressed that this company has the fundamentals together to be a good investment. I sure wouldn't invest in them with.

I wish good luck to the folks at VMware. Their product has been extremely useful to me when I could get it to work. But honestly, you need to get off of your high horse and get back down to Earth. The valley is littered with the bones of other companies who had similar high opinions of themselves, but didn't have the basics down.

Re:Pfft. I'm not impressed.

[Chicken04GTO]

An interesting review. We've used their products in-house for sometime now, and while I dont use itpersonally (I use MS VPC) most of the people who work with it on a daily basis dont like it for various reasons.

Re:Pfft. I'm not impressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

The workstation in particular, with Fedora and Centos, I had to jump through hoops (and even then had trouble)

That's because Fedora is not intended as a production system, and CentOS is never going to be officially supported by any vendor. If you'd use RHEL or SLES you'd have faired better.

Not only that, but frankly VMWare don't care all that much about Workstation and Server anyway. They're secondary to the real money makers, ESX & Virtual Centre.

Re:Pfft. I'm not impressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly you don't seem to know what the difference is between Centos and RHEL. I have to doubt the quality of your opinion.

Re:Pfft. I'm not impressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

I know exactly what the "difference" is and it makes no difference: CentOS will never be supported directly by a vendor. Try opening a support ticket with Oracle for 10g running on CentOS instead of RHEL and see what they say, I dare you.

CentOS is a cheap "close enough" solution for those who don't want or need to pay the full RHEL license, and nothing else. Is something like VMWare Workstation doesn't work as well as you'd like: tough. Pay for the real thing and you can get proper support from RedHat and VMWare. Otherwise you're on your own.

I'd say "nice strawman" but it wasn't even that.

Re:Pfft. I'm not impressed.

[ChrisA90278]

I'm not impressed either. I came to them with cash in hand and a simple pre-sales question. If a salesman had called back he could have made a sale. But as a result of such very poor service before the sale I figured after sale service would be even worse and decided not to invest in anything but their free products and even then to continue tracking other alternatives.

Their main products simply don't work on modern versions of Linux. One has to either modify their product with a 3rd party patch or down grade the OS to run VMware.

But you can get it to work so I figure the free (beer) product worth what I paid for it.

Re:Pfft. I'm not impressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow - you just don't undestand the market, or your own words. You said "If you'd use RHEL or SLES you'd have faired better". Normally this implies that the product would have worked better. But you seem to mean that one could open a support ticket and hope and pray that maybe someone would help.

I don't think you've ever dealt with the "support" these companies offer. The bottom line is that if the basics don't work out of the box on Centos, it's not going to work on RHEL. You are guaranteed to be required to have to open a service ticket.

So explain to me why I should buy a product which doesn't work, and that may not ever get fixed in the timeframe that I need it? I'll stick with the options that I know work, thankyouverymuch.

As for the market, the free products are superb marketing and advertising. I have no problem with getting my customers to pay for the full product and service agreements; I've done this many times in the past. I'd daresay I do it every place that I go, but there may be an odd exception that I've forgotten. In short, many companies have made lots of money off of my recommendations. And I've cost other companies a lot of money by not recommending them. VMWare right now is in the latter camp.

Unless and until VMware starts realizing how much bad advertising is costing them, and fixes things, I won't be using or recommending their products. You can take that fact to the bank; but not, alas, the money I'd like to be sending them. That will have to go to the other solutions.

Re:Pfft. I'm not impressed.

[HalimCMe]

VMware does most of their contracting through their VMware Authorized Consultant Partner (VAC) program. These are companies that employ certified consultants and do both their own work and work subcontracted by VMware. You may have better luck finding a local VAC and working with them to schedule a consultant's time. VAC Locator

Re:Pfft. I'm not impressed.

[flyingfsck]

I found VMware Server installs and works on a RHEL5 host, but RHEL5 won't install on it!

Re:Pfft. I'm not impressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you've ever dealt with the "support" these companies offer.

No, I am absolutely not an admin for a three machine cluster running ESX 3 with Virtual Centre, with multiple RHEL hosts running Oracle.

The bottom line is that if the basics don't work out of the box on Centos, it's not going to work on RHEL.

Oh it should be, but have you checked? Perhaps the VMWare installer checks which platform is in use and is confused by CentOS not being RHEL? It may be a simple bug in the VMWare installer.

I'll stick with the options that I know work, thankyouverymuch.

Whoopey, you do that. Like I said, VMWare don't care so much anyway.

As for the market, the free products are superb marketing and advertising.

Agreed. VMWare Player and Server are great products that are heavily used and no doubt have contributed a lot to sales of VMWare products. But we are talking about Workstation, which isn't free.

Re:Pfft. I'm not impressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

"No, I am absolutely not an admin for a three machine cluster running ESX 3 with Virtual Centre, with multiple RHEL hosts running Oracle."

Thanks for admiting that you've never dealt with the support offered by Redhat or Vmware. Of course, that didn't stop you from suggesting that as a "solution". But at least we've established that you have no idea whatsoever of what you're talking about.

"Oh it should be, but have you checked? Perhaps the VMWare installer checks which platform is in use and is confused by CentOS not being RHEL? It may be a simple bug in the VMWare installer."

Perhaps. But VMware gets installed just fine. It dies after you set up a virtual disk and try to install Centos on top of it. This is when running on top of Centos to begin with. The same applies to Fedora 5, 6,7. And yes, I'm positive about this; someone else reported the exact same problem elsewhere on this thread. And by "dying" I mean it hangs forever at some random spot during the installation. Usually more than 50% of the way through.

One would think that this would be a basic QA test for supported O.S.'s. But apparently it's not.

"Whoopey, you do that. Like I said, VMWare don't care so much anyway."

That's one of the reasons why they are a poorly run business. Someone else reported that he couldn't give VMware money for the product.

Now, I work with Fortune 100 - 1000 sized companies and make recommendations for them. Perhaps VMware doesn't care about this kind of customer. I very strongly doubt it. But I admit it could be. I've only seen one company who wouldn't return calls for an entire Cisco Business Unit when we had the P.O. in place. That was MontaVista. Truly staggering stupidity, as that's as close to free cash as you can get.

But this makes my point. Poorly run companies will lose major business. And VMWare seems to be in this boat. Oh yes, MontaVista was in trouble the last I heard.

"Agreed. VMWare Player and Server are great products that are heavily used and no doubt have contributed a lot to sales of VMWare products. But we are talking about Workstation, which isn't free."

The Eval version is, for 30 days. That's what I use when I'm looking at their product. If it works, I buy it (or have my client start off with a small order). But yes, VMWare does indeed get cash for their products. All too often, they stand to either gain or lose quite a bit.

But I suppose if they aren't concerned about making money, well, that's their business. As I originally said, I've seen lots of this type of company come and go. Right now, I doubt that they'll be around in 10 years; or if they are, it will be a small shell of what they currently are.

Trusted Computing

[goombah99]

VMware's association with intel brings to mind some questions related to Trusted Computing. Now setting aside whether or not you like trusted computing, it does enable some valuable applications so it's going to happen. Now is all the implementations I've seen described there is a progressive trust is creates as each layer of the os-middle-ware-applications-data validates the next layer is unaltered. And all this starts with some trusted boot loader.

it's difficult to see anyway that around not having this seed trust be in some piece of unalterable hardware. And even though they are not doing trusted computing I would specualte that apple puts in a few hardware doo-dads so the software can validate it's running on apple hardware. (they may not be taking advantage of this yet but I bet it's lurking).

So then since it's likely that intel will be making the trusted computing hardware, will they grant the ability to emulate the hardware to their VM?

Re:Trusted Computing

[A non-mouse Coward]

Now is all the implementations I've seen described there is a progressive trust is creates as each layer ...

I think your browser's Bayesian Spam Filter is working in negation, keeping you from making any sense to English speakers. Just how [is] many [is] verbs does [is] a geek's sentence [is] need?

And before the obligatory reponse: 42!

Re:Trusted Computing

[Anonymous Coward]

making any sense to English speakers. Just how [is] many [is] verbs does [is] a geek's sentence [is] need?

It depends on what the meaning of the words 'is' is.

Re:Trusted Computing

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now setting aside whether or not you like trusted computing, it does enable some valuable applications so it's going to happen. "

Like a nice Intel/Microsoft/US government rootkit right in your hardware?

Why not just use FOSS and secure the hardware yourself, with your OWN keys?

Re:Trusted Computing

[Talchas]

it does enable some valuable applications so it's going to happen. Umm, what valuable applications? The only things I've heard for it are for DRM and similar things. I guess it could be useful to protect against rootkits or similar things... But the reason "it's going to happen" would be far more in the first column than the second.

Re:Trusted Computing

[kestasjk]

They haven't bought VMWare; a 13% stake is significant but Intel aren't running VMWare now by any means.

Re:Trusted Computing

[goombah99]

Transactions.
real and secure electronic banking. Electronic voting. All sorts of commerce.

Re:Trusted Computing

[Solra Bizna]

Why not just use FOSS and secure the hardware yourself, with your OWN keys?

That is the intention of TPM.

-:sigma.SB

Re:Trusted Computing

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that you used the word "emulated" underscores the fact that you don't understand how processor is virtualized in VMware!

Re:What does this hold for AMD - crappy VMWare

[Anonymous Coward]

It will probably mean that future versions of VMWare will run really crappy on AMD processors.

Just like when Intel intentionally rigged their C compiler to produce crappy code when it detects (BTW - in a non-standard, underhanded way) an AMD processor.

Obviously This Means FreeBSD Support, Right?

[link915]

So, now that VMWare has all of this money to throw around will they finally release a native FreeBSD player? Or maybe VirtualBox will beat them to it...or maybe anyone can do it besides Win4BSD because that is just not good software.

FWIW, Otellini uses Parallels...

[frankie]

...but I suppose he'll switch to Fusion once it's final. http://parallelsvirtualization.blogspot.com/2007/0 6/intel-ceo-paul-ottelini-uses-parallels.html

Purchasing stock

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me young and clueless, but how does one go about purchasing stock during an IPO?

Re:Purchasing stock

[bobsledbob]

You don't.

Re:Purchasing stock

[dhasenan]

You can sell a limited amount of stock to a limited number of people before your IPO. Around here, you could sell to 35 people or companies, and I'm not sure how much you could sell. It differs by jurisdiction, though, I'm sure.

Re:Purchasing stock

[Anonymous Coward]

So to elaborate on - "You don't"

The simple jist is that you as an ordinary joe can't buy during the first days of an IPO. You, me and every other sucker
out there can't. It's only available to really the rich people. I am sure others will flame me on this but it is essentially
true. Once the stock is available to the public then you can. However, don't expect to get rich in one week. So let's say
the IPO starts at say $20 bucks. The rich people get in on the IPO. The share price may close at $30 bucks or even $40.
Of course it can go down - see Vonage IPO.

Once it is available to the general public, then you can start purchasing via Etrade or your broker. But keep in mind that
the initial price of $20 will be gone and us suckers can get in after the rich people made their money. So you may buy when
it gets to $40 bucks a share and it may flux to $45 or go down by close etc, etc. So you may make an extra .20 a share but
the rich bastards get double, triple, quad, etc their money back.

If you remember Google tried to open the door to general public IPO but it really didn't work out that way. IPO is really to
get the stock market moving upwards and create jazz around the serious investor to invest, so that the economy moves forward,
more jobs created, etc, etc. So thusly, us suckers/idiots can't get in because we would throw the curve off because we have no
clue on what we are doing and thusly create a huge surge on worthless companies - i.e. dot-com boom, then create a huge crash.
IPO are for only serious investors to invest first and they then set the bar/correct levels of the stock price for us normal
joe's to later purchase.

This may not be the best definition but it the jist of it.

Re:Purchasing stock

[bobsledbob]

It's how the investment banks lock up the initial number of stocks. They only offer to sell it to others in their circles (special clients, special brokers, etc.). The only people getting rich off of the IPO are the investment bankers and their privileged clients.

The real purpose of an IPO, from the SEC's point of view, is to get the stock out at a stable market price with a lot of the volatility removed. The investment bankers take the risk of the IPO and essentially take the volatility out so that it's "safe" for you and I to invest in. In some cases, the investment bankers lose money because of this risk. If it's a good well known company, they usually make money. In fact, they make a killing.

But remember, the whole point is to bring the stock out to the market in a way that the price has mostly stabilized.

Eventually, the stock will be available through normal purchasing means (again, after the price has stabilized). Most of the time the IPO "windfall" has already been bought and sold away. Other times, like for Google, the stock keeps going up after the IPO. Thus, the fair market price for the stock was NOT found during the IPO stage. If you look at it like this, Google's IPO was a failure because their stock was obviously not priced at the market price coming out of the IPO (as it still quadrupled in the following year).

Anyway, unless you have lots and lots of money or have some sort of other insider line, you are not able to "share" in the "risk" of the IPO like those with lots of cash.

Re:Purchasing stock

[Roydd McWilson]

That's not quite right. The IPO, or Initial Public Offering, is when the stock is first offered to be publicly traded on an exchange (such as Nasdaq or NYSE). Before that point, shares can be bought and sold privately between entities, they're simply not listed publicly. Generally what happens is that one or more underwriters (typically investment banks) will buy the shares from the selling party, and then offer them for sale on the market for the IPO. The advantages of this setup are that the company gets a guaranteed amount of cash from the IPO, and the actual public trading is handled by a third party, rather than insiders. But other owners can also sell at that time. And you can buy shares as soon as the ask and bid prices converge to the point that ask is sufficiently below bid. But often times due to the confusion of the IPO, this isn't going to be a very good price, at least short term.

Hardware Acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they can spend at least 1% of that money and get some fucking hardware acceleration going on the VMWare client. How about it guys? Maybe that's one less corporate jet?

Intel's investing in other virtualization company

[ericdujardin]

See http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4223741314.html It looks like they want to make sure good virtualization software is available on their processors.

Date ?

[Skaber]

When can we expect to place our first buy on VMWare ? Any idea of when they will complete the IPO ? Informations/Suspicions ?

numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

218.5 of 950 is 23%, not 13%, unless I'm looking at the wrong numbers.

Most of the implementations Intel?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about that. Most of the implementations we are associated with or at least I know of are built with AMD processors. Intel has that nasty problem with processor 0. We wouldn't recommend anything BUT AMD for VMWare at this point in time.

Re:What does this hold for AMD - crappy VMWare

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had modpoints, I'd mod parent up.

It's true - Intel's C compiler produces low quality code for no reason if it detects an AMD CPU. Use Google to get the facts.

I lost faith in Intel when I found that out. I thought they were a straight-up company before.

Special command set

[Weaselmancer]

With Intel and VMware close partners, I'll bet VMware will have a say as to the next series of commands to be added to their x86 line.

They would never abandon AMD, but they could say that VMware gets better performance on an Intel chipset with the new XYZ command extension set.

It would be an excellent move, too. They wouldn't abandon any of the market, but it would tip the scales in favor of their new benefactor.

Re:Special command set

[bberens]

It would be an excellent move, too. They wouldn't abandon any of the market, but it would tip the scales in favor of their new benefactor.

Good for VMWare and Intel yes. Good for us? Probably not. I'm not really an AMD fanboy but I don't want the scales tipping too far towards Intel. We need competition in the market.

Intel Invests $218M in VMWare?

[One Childish N00b]

Sounds like the perfect investment plan to me - As long as they create a snapshot, if it all goes badly they can just push the right button and go again.

Pixel

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if somebody invested such money in Pixel, http://www.kanzelsberger.com/

Where is google???

[hesaigo999ca]

I always said that this is the monster google should HAVE bought up when they could of...
This coupled with their server technology and gmail accounts, could easily have set up virtual desktop environments for all their clients to be able to install lets say office or any other
software, and then log unto another machine, and loggin into thier accounts, then be able to
run it without reinstall....how many would have given up their hotmail then???

Anyways, too late now, but would have been nice!

VmWare + Intel + Google + Apple

[at_$tephen]

What's wrong with the above equation? Well, Microsoft is missing from it, yet it is a viable equation. What we are seeing with VmWare is a classic Innovator Dilemma of Christensen lore. I would have added Ubuntu (on VmWare???) but it's still too early to tell as there is nothing really compelling enough in Ubuntu at this stage to bring about a new standard: just because a production ingredient - software services - is done cheaply does not necessarily make a good business or product. In any case, while Microsoft was gunning for Google a far more dangerous and sinister competitor was taking a foothold at the very root of its source of domination. As Ballmer said in a February NyTimes article on VmWare, "Everybody in the operating system business wants to be the guy on the bottom" . I would replace "operating system" with simply "computing". Moore's law, basic economics, and, most of all, what users want are driving the changes. Intel will be at the very bottom, then VmWare being the key value addition on the server, and then stuff goes out the Internet organized by Google, and you, the end user, rely on a string of Apple devices to connect with that information.

I'm not saying Microsoft won't matter, but the companies that make it big in tech sit at the sweet critical value spots in the whole package and right now those spot are moving away from Microsoft. I have no idea why Gates is leaving now when his company is no doubt facing the worst threats of its entire life. At least IBM had its ivory towers of untouchable mainframes built over years of honest work to see it through and that business is still healthy. It also has services which are actually more fundamental to its roots from the days Thomas Watson Sr transformed the company using the skills he learned as a salesman under John Patterson of the National Cash Register. Anyways, the problem with the way big tech growth areas emerge is that once you notice them, it's almost too late to stop the trend. Companies like Xensource will remain dwarfs unless VmWare seriously F***s up. Microsoft got away with heavy handed aggressive tactics against Netscape, but now we all know about those tactics and they won't work quite as well against VmWare and Google. Of the two VmWare is a far worse nightmare because Google could very well be a passing cloud due to the torrential growth of the web: the web will continuously demand new ways of organizing information and it will not be one size fits all so the search engine market will evolve like the dog eat dog market for hard drives (incidentally, that's why I applaud Yahoo's appointment of Jerry Yang as CEO because in my view search is still very much a computing guts business and we need "warrior CEOs" like Gates was to lead such companies). Dominating the guts of computing is the best sweet spot. Apple is also in a very sweet spot because its instinct for design and "grokking" what the user wants is an extremely tangible asset that is not easily replicated. At first I ridiculed the iPhone but now I can't wait to get my hands on one. If I were Microsoft I would harakiri myself and break up into pieces that can more effectively compete against these threats. The value of the individual pieces separated may be greater than their current value. Standard Oil did this back in the early 1900s and that's what actually made Rockefeller a billionaire.

Why ?

[Big Bipper]

Why would Intel invest in a company whose product reduces the number of computers and chips its customers use ? Look at IBM. Their chips and servers are now so powerfull, they're selling far fewer systems altogether and have had to turn themselves into a services company. The only reason I can see that makes sense is to somehow sabatage VMWare. Unfortunately the cat is out of the bag with products like XEN so Intel can never kill virtualization.

Re:Why ?

[charlesnw]

Um. Its a bit more complicated then that. People buying servers to run VmWare are buying big beefy boxes. The per unit profit is much higher then standard commodity boxes.

Thanks for the offtopic spam

[Anonymous Coward]

That's got absolutely nothing to do with what I posted. If you're going to post ads in the future, please try to keep it a little bit relevant.