Dennis Byron (Research 2.0)

VMware Hammered in After-Hours Trading

It's not really the nickel miss or the lowered expecations for 2008, Greg. The institutions moved like a herd into VMware last summer and the herd provides cover as they bail out of what they have known to be bad investment for months. The statistics are just an excuse.

Analyst after analyst on the conference call whined, "But 50% annual growth really means only a 35% growth run rate by the end of 2008." If the fall of 2008 is like the fall of 2001 (the analogy many macroeconomic analyses are setting up), 35% growth rate next fall could be 35x software market growth.

VMware's Pipeline Looks Strong - Jeffries

Those ELAs would hopefully go a ways in removing this wording from VMware's SEC filings: "we may have little or no contact with the ultimate users of our products..."

But it's not clear that that's what's happening so the question is "Is the pipeline being filled by the many new partners VMware has lined up in the last few years?" These new partners accounted for less than 5% of the growth through the first three quarters of 2007 according to the Nov. 2007 10Q. Is the pipeline still heavily dominated by Ingram Micro, which provided 29% of 2006 revenue?