Yesterday VMware confirmed that it would be laying off 900 people, about 5% of its workforce. Generally speaking, that’s really not so horrible or uncommon for a larger company. I don’t think VMware is going anywhere any time soon, but it is worth noting some of the things that are going on there. Of course, they’re part of the acquisition between Dell and EMC which has changed things a lot. Their stock has fallen from the high 90s to around 45 today…so almost a 50% drop.
It also seems that they wlil be getting rid of the Workstation/Fusion BU, which was a little surprising to me. Almost everyone I know has a Workstation (for PC) or Fusion (for Mac) app on their computer for running demos, or Windows VMs if they use Macs, etc. Though, I’m sure the margins aren’t great and people can always use cloud solutions for demos.
They also seem to be backing off their vCloud Air product, which I’m not sure very really took off. But it seems they’re realizing they can’t compete with the likes of AWS, Google…and dare I say it…even Azure.