"Bloomberg believe VMware’s IPO today may the largest technology offering since Google. But doubts have been cast over the company’s supposedly proprietary ESX product, which may be derived from Linux.
VMware recreated the modern virtualization industry, resurging an idea last heard of in the 80s to allow multiple instances of an Operating System run simultaneously on the same hardware, on today’s commodity systems.
VMware has 55% market share and few competitors: Microsoft’s competing Veridian virtualization originally scheduled for this years Windows Server release has slipped to 2009, and Xen, supported by IBM, Red Hat and Sun, has yet to get into the hands of their customers en masse.
VMware owns this market right now, and even if VMware’s share shrinks - and nobody’s saying that - Garner estimates VMs will grow from 5 to 40% of new Operating System installs will be on VMs by 2009. Their IPO this week promises to be one of the biggest since the early 2000s."