The Palo Alto based VMware Inc. was founded by Diane Greene, Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Dr. Edward Wang and Edouard Bugnion in 1998. As the guideline of innovation they set the goal to abstract he x86 operating systems and applications from the hardware resources. This abstraction provides more flexible use of resources, makes simpler operation and higher availability for the virtualized systems.
Short historical review, main milestones: