VMware Stock Soars in a Down Market – Proving Virtualization Technology

VMware’s initial IPO was a happy day for VMware, investors and the virtualization industry, although it wasn’t a great day for the market overall.

Coming out of the IPO gate at $29 a share, VMware’s stock saw an immediate gain that day of 72% where it finally settled at $51 per share. And according to Thomson Financial, this was the largest first-day gain of the year. The market itself dropped by over 200 points, but that didn’t seem to affect the mood around the virtualization community.

Today, the stock continued to trade well, boosting itself another 13% to a closing price of $57.71 and reaching as high as $59.87 during the day.

VMware’s stock price greatly reflects the positive things that the company has accomplished over the years; but it also reflects the virtualization market as a whole. People are finally paying special attention to a market that has a lot of potential left in its magical bag of tricks.

Other server virtualization platforms are now being given more respect and a second look by many in the financial industry. Citrix took the opportunity to announce that it was acquiring XenSource, a VMware competitor who oddly enough had also just announced the release of their latest virtualization hypervisor product, bringing it closer to feature parity with VMware’s VI3 product.

With more eyes now focusing on the virtualization industry, other companies in this space will also start looking for similar success. And because the technology is so broad and far reaching, this market isn’t limited to server virtualization. Desktop, application, operating system and storage virtualization will all benefit from this event. So stay tuned!