I shorted VMW just before the close today via puts. It was only 2 contracts and the strike price was at $90. I was going to bet more, I usually go in a position with 10 contracts, but I have some financial obligations coming up so I didn't want to risk too much.<p>I have a few friends that work there. They are happy, but they say that the company lacks any sense of urgency. After Maritz left and more recently Steve Herrod, there seems to be a dearth of really brilliant and inspirational people in the top positions. A lot of great engineers were lost after the 4 year post-IPO options expiration came due last year. As well, there is a lot of middle management, and lots of politics, and apparently lots of fat-cat principal engineers that stick around and do not very much.<p>All of this spells a recipe for stagnation. The debacle over the last year or so with licensing only cemented the idea that ESX is expensive, and Hyper-V is getting to "good enough" status.
I don't believe these people are being fired... at least not all of them. Take a look at a report from 2 months ago[1]. 600 people from VMWare are working on Pivotal, if those people don't count on VMWare's books anymore, that would be a reduction in headcount.<p>Also, the Chicago Tribune[2] article is better than the BizJournals one. One key point in this article is that by the end of 2013, they expect to hire 1000 new employees.<p>This all sounds like shuffling around of people and trimming a little fat, and has nothing to do with VMWare possibly doing badly.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/12/05/vmware-confirms-pivotal-big-data-cloud-application-platform-spin-off/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/12/05/vmware-confirms-pivotal-...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-vmware-resultsbre90r139-20130128,0,1231388.story" rel="nofollow">http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-vmware-resu...</a>
Long time VMware employee here.<p>While this is of course a sad event, it is not a reflection on the strength/weakness of VMware. Actually for a lot of my time here, we've had "carte blanche" in terms of hiring. The challenge was finding enough qualified people. I do think with the recent slew of acquisitions, the company may have grown too much too fast and is needing to reorganize hence this announcement.<p>From what I heard, the company is still planning to grow its headcount in 2013 from where it is today. It is also engaged in a massive expansion project which will triple the size of the campus in Palo Alto. It would not be undertaking such a massive and costly effort if a permanent downsize is being envisaged.
Technical recruiter here. Just talked to VMWare recruiters that were interested in hiring as of last week. Doesn't mean that the story isn't true; just thought that I'd share.
I tried to set our office servers up using VMWare virtualisation stuff a couple of months ago.<p>It was a struggle finding out what I needed, then finding a way to pay for it, then finding out I'd bought the wrong thing.<p>They have so many versions of the same product, slightly renamed, with slightly different features - which isn't totally apparent. They seem to have renamed products, but have the old version of the product next to the new version - so you don't exactly know they're different products.<p>It seems to me that they could benefit a lot from slimming down and offering just 3 products - instead of the 100+ currently.<p>I can't have been the only person totally confused by all of this - and ultimately it's got to be hurting more than it's gaining.
i cannot believe it.<p><pre><code> > projecting revenue in the range of $1.17 billion to $1.19
> billion, compared with $1.25 billion expected by analysts.
> VMWare shares fell 15 percent
</code></pre>
they're still talking about 1.2 BILLION in revenue.
it's never enough ...
<i>According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Monday, the company will be making a "planned exit of certain business lines"</i><p>Anyone care to speculate about what these business lines are? The virtual network tech acquired with Nicira ?
I'm curious what business lines are being trimmed, as referenced in the article. What other lines of business (the phrasing makes me think this is externally facing business, not internal departments) is VMware involved in beyond the core virtualization biz?
this is why I don't work for mega software corps<p>i bet all these poor bastard devs had to do 'team building exercises', file endless TPS reports, and forced to enjoy TGIF jeans day to indoctrinate you into the company cult then it's layoff time.