To mark the occasion, the company has created an interactive timeline on its website which charts the story of its “20 years of innovation”.
The timeline begins with the company’s founding in 1998, in Palo Alto, California, when “five forward-thinking technologists, all passionate about creating a new way to compute, come together” to form the business, with Diane Green taking the helm as CEO.
By the end of its first year, the company had grown to 20 employees. From then on, development was rapid, as between 1999 and 2002 VMware successfully presented its first product – Workstation 1.0 – and reached $1 million (€833,538) in bookings.
Further innovations followed, such as ESX Server 1.5, vMotion, and the vCentre server.
In 2003, the company expanded its operations to the UK, and since then has gone on to open new offices elsewhere around the world, in locations as far flung as the Middle East and Latin America.
In 2004 the company was acquired by EMC Corporation for $635 million (€529.2 million); that year also marked the inaugural hosting of the company’s VMworld cloud computing and virtualisation conference.
Fast forward to 2007 and VMware moved to its new headquarters in the Stanford Research Park, where it remains to this day. Further landmarks followed, including the business reporting that it closed 2008 with $1.9 billion (€1.5 billion) of revenue, while in 2010 the company embarked on a philanthropic venture, launching the VMware Foundation.
As the years continued to go by, the company made acquisitions, including Nicira and AirWatch, and then in 2015 became embroiled in tech history as Dell announced its intention to acquire EMC Corporation, which included its stake in VMware.
Most recently, in 2017, VMware launched its Pulse IoT Centre, introduced its Pivotal Container Service, and reached 20,000 employees, working for the company across the globe.
