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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.'"
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...
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.
Most of our ESX hosts (about a dozen in total) are AMD chips.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
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.]
But it would be a 19,000 day supply of hookers and cocaine for bender.
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.
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?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
See http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4223741314.html
It looks like they want to make sure good virtualization software is available on their processors.
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.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
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.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.