A Virtual Gold Mine

Here's a great story about VMware's IPO , I think they're a really great company with some great products.

While the rest of the stock market was taking a wild roller-coaster ride this week, a tech public offering got a warm welcome from investors.

By Steven Musil Cnet News

Investors in VMware's initial public offering got a rocket ride as the highly anticipated IPO launched out of the gate with an initial trade of $52 a share. VMware investors who snapped up shares at $29 a pop as part of the IPO offering reaped a profit of 79 percent on that first trade.

VMware's stellar stock offering shows that virtual machines are starting to add up to real dollars. Virtual machines, the technology that VMware helped pioneer, allow one computer to act as many, whether it's a Mac running Windows and the Mac operating system at the same time or a massive server running multiple instances of Windows and Linux simultaneously. Once a niche technology, virtualization is expanding rapidly as businesses try to get more bang for their server buck.

Both open-source rivals and commercial software makers see a chance to win business customers by offering similar features to VMware, but at a far lower price.

One day after the spectacular public offering of virtualization company VMware, Citrix Systems said that it intends to acquire open-source virtualization company XenSource for about $500 million. Citrix makes so-called thin client software that delivers business applications from servers to desktop computers.

By acquiring XenSource, the company intends to move into the adjacent server and desktop virtualization market. The company's open-source "hypervisor" software, called Xen, lets a single computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously, which is a useful way to replace servers with one, more efficiently used computer.

Well I think we can now all say that virtualization is on fire, and the VMware's IPO is merely the beginning. Virtualization is a breakthrough technology which actually allows one to run both operating systems on a single machine at the same time.
In case you've never seen Virtualization in action, check out this video, it rocks!