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VMware Acquires Shavlik Technologies

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Virtualization software juggernaut VMware this morning announced that it has agreed to buy Shavlik Technologies, a provider of cloud-based IT management solutions for small and medium businesses (SMBs).

Financial terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed later this year, were not disclosed, but Mark Shavlik was ‘happy‘ to announce the agreement: “I want to thank all Shavlik employees past and present as well as our partners. Because of your hard work and dedication, we were able to build a great company…Our two companies have a long-term relationship built upon VMware GO™, our joint SaaS based IT Management solution. VMware GO assists SMBs with rapid deployment and management of VMware vSphere, the VMware Hypervisor and general IT management of both physical and virtual computers. VMware GO has attracted over 200,000 registered users creating more than 20,000 VMware Hypervisors and 120,000 Virtual machines. Shavlik and VMware share a vision of IT Management for now and the future. A vision of delivering solid, easy to use IT solutions to SMBs to enable customers to take full advantage of the efficiencies gained with the latest technologies. ”

Shavlik Technologies was founded in 1993 to offer a new approach to security application design and development that enabled us to take big steps in the simplification of computer security while at the same time creating a very trustworthy product. Since then, we have grown to help thousands of customers simplify their IT management.

Shavlik Technologies provides on-premise and SaaS-based management solutions that enable SMBs to manage, monitor and secure their IT environments when moving to virtual and cloud computing IT deployments.

Some view this acquisition as a way for VMware to ‘shield’ their customers from popular configuration management and deployment tools, such as Puppet, Opscode’s Chef, and even Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM).

According to VMware’s press release, Shavlik currently has more than 3,500 customers using their on premise IT management products.

Citrix’s Q1 2011: Revenue Grows 18 Percent To $491 Million

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Citrix Systems recently reported financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2011 ended March 31, 2011.

The company achieved revenue of $491 million, compared to $414 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2010, representing 18 percent revenue growth. Net income for the first quarter of fiscal 2011 was $74 million, or $0.38 per diluted share, compared to $47 million, or $0.25 per diluted share, for the first quarter of 2010.

“I’m pleased with our results for the first quarter,” said Mark Templeton, president and chief executive officer for Citrix. “Customer demand was solid across our core SaaS, desktop and networking markets, especially in the Americas and Pacific, supported by large, strategic technical services engagements.

In addition to quarterly financial results, Citrix also announced that its board of directors has authorized it to repurchase up to an additional $500 million of its common stock. As of March 31, 2011, approximately $11.5 million remained for repurchases from previous authorizations.

Virtualization Vet Jason Mattox Joins Liquidware Labs As CTO

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Liquidware Labs recently announced industry vet Jason Mattox as its new chief technology officer, to further desktop and user virtualization for the masses.

Mattox was one of the original founding members at Vizioncore, now part of Quest Software.

Prior to creating vRanger at Vizioncore, Mattox specialized in migrating corporations from PCs to virtual desktops using technologies such as Windows Server, IGC MultiNode, and MaxSpeed MaxStations, an early stage multi-user desktop virtualization product, followed by Microsoft Windows Terminal Server and various Citrix products.

Liquidware Labs plans to recruit additional team members.

VMware Acquires SlideRocket

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VMware recently announced that it has acquired SlideRocket, an SaaS-based business presentation provider.

Terms of the acquisition were not announced.

SlideRocket delivers innovative presentation solutions that uniquely leverage modern concepts of cloud computing, collaboration, social media and mobile computing platforms. More than 20,000 customers and 300,000 users leverage Slide Rocket to more effectively build, deliver and share presentations.

SlideRocket is built specifically to take advantage of a modern web and cloud based end-user computing model that blurs the lines between presentations, websites and multi-media content.

The acquisition of SlideRocket advances VMware’s vision for a modern end-user computing model leveraging cloud computing to securely deliver access to applications and data from any device, where and when a user needs it. Presentation software is second only to email as the most widely used business software.

VMware Reports Q1 2011 Earnings: Revenue Up 33% To $844 Million YoY

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VMware recently reported results for the first quarter of the year.

Revenues for Q1 2011 were $844 million, an increase of 33% from the first quarter of 2010. Operating income for the first quarter was $154 million, an increase of 50% from the first quarter of 2010.

Net income for the first quarter was $126 million, or $0.29 per diluted share, compared to $78 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, for the first quarter of 2010.

Trailing twelve months operating cash flows were $1.3 billion, an increase of 20%. Trailing twelve months free cash flows were $1.3 billion, an increase of 39%.

U.S. revenues for the first quarter of 2011 grew 26% to $400 million from the first quarter of 2010. International revenues grew 40% to $444 million from the first quarter of 2010.

License revenues for the first quarter of 2011 were $419 million, an increase of 34% from the first quarter of 2010. Service revenues, which include software maintenance and professional services, were $425 million for the first quarter of 2011, an increase of 32% from the first quarter of 2010.

Nutanix Raises $13.2 Million In Funding

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Nutanix, developer of a converged compute and storage appliance for virtualized data centers, today announced that it has received $13.2 million in Series A funding in a “significantly oversubscribed” round.

Investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners and Blumberg Capital.

The funding will be used to help Nutanix establish a strong market presence in North America.

Nutanix is bringing “Google-like” scale-out and converged infrastructure to the world of virtualized data centers. Designed from the ground up for server and desktop virtualization, Nutanix Complete Appliance shrinks the datacenter through its converged architecture, reducing capital costs, power consumption and administration costs.

Nutanix Complete Appliance brings data closer to virtual machines, delivering true convergence through a combination of scalable software and industry-standard hardware components. Purpose-built for virtualization, the Nutanix converged architecture provides cost, performance and manageability benefits that are not possible by simply bundling servers and storage.

Co-founder and CEO Dheeraj Pandey was formerly vice president of engineering at Aster Data and played a leadership role in the development of Oracle Database and Oracle Exadata. Co-founder Dr. Mohit Aron, CTO, was lead architect at Aster Data and earlier led the design and development of Google File System (GFS), the software that manages data on Google’s converged compute and storage clusters.

Co-founder and chief products officer Ajeet Singh was previously senior director of product management at Aster Data and played a key role in defining Oracle’s early strategy for cloud computing. In addition to Pandey, Aron and Singh, the Nutanix board of directors includes Ravi Mhatre and Bipul Sinha from Lightspeed Venture Partners.