Who Owns VMware?

VMware was founded in 1998 in Palo Alto by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Ellen Wang, and Edouard Bugnion. Its first products commercialized x86 virtualization, the technology for running multiple virtual machines on a single physical server, starting with VMware Workstation in 1999 and ESX Server in 2001, which brought virtualization to enterprise data centers.

The company essentially created the enterprise virtualization market and dominated it through the 2000s with vSphere, the successor platform that combined the ESXi hypervisor with vCenter management. EMC acquired VMware in 2004 for $625 million and later floated part of it publicly in 2007 while retaining control. Through Dell's 2016 acquisition of EMC, VMware moved inside Dell Technologies, which spun it off in November 2021 as a fully independent public company.

The independence lasted two years. Broadcom announced the acquisition in May 2022 and closed in November 2023 after an extended global regulatory review. Post-close, Broadcom executed the most aggressive restructuring in the company's history: cutting headcount by roughly half in the first year, ending perpetual licenses, bundling the portfolio into subscriptions, and restructuring the partner program.

The changes produced sustained customer backlash. Price increases at renewal, the forced bundling of VCF, the removal of the vSphere Standard product updates, and the cancellation of partner tiers drove churn toward Nutanix, Red Hat OpenShift, and public clouds. Broadcom claimed more than 90 percent of VMware's largest 10,000 customers signed up for VCF, but the practices drew lawsuits from Tesco, Siemens, and T-Mobile US, plus a European Commission request for information. Broadcom responded through 2025 and 2026 with per-core pricing standardization, license portability, and a pledge to update vSphere Standard.