Big move today in Isilon Systems: shares of the storage systems company have jumped $1.08, or 19.9 percent, to $6.49, on volume of more than 660,000 shares, or more than 4x the daily average. Today’s rise boosts the company’s three-day rally to 33 percent.
So, what’s going on here?
Well, here’s what I know.
VMworld, the annual conference hosted by software maker VMware, is fast becoming one of the hot tech conferences, in large part because VMware’s technology has become an important selling point for tech-equipment makers like Dell and Cisco Systems. There are likely to be dozens of new product announcements made at the conference, which kicks off Monday.
I don’t often look to movies about beer for poignant macroeconomic commentary, but as February ended with an 8.1 percent unemployment rate (and rising), a line from “Strange Brew” struck me as particularly relevant. As they’re introduced to their new jobs as the only two workers on the bottling line, the Mackenzie brothers are told: “Welcome to 1984, the age of automation and unemployment. The rise of the machine and the fall of man. The end of the human era.”
Another light in the darkness. In this case, “virtual” darkness. VMWare–which sells virtualization software–ended the quarter with a 32 percent increase in domestic sales and a 42 percent increase in international sales. These are stats just about any Silicon Valley company would like to claim about now. The company’s not out buying exercise balls, though. It warned against expecting the same results next quarter, saying that global product demand is difficult to predict, due to “current uncertainty in global economic conditions.”
Competition is intensifying in the virtualization sector.
Red Hat (RHT) this morning announced an agreement to acquire Qumranet, an Israeli company that provides a virtualization software platform, for $107 million in cash.
Investors continued to shed VMware (VMW) shares today in the wake of yesterday’s firing of CEO Diane Greene and a reduction in the company’s 2008 outlook.
The company, which went public August 13, 2007, at $29 a share, immediately went soaring higher, trading as high as $125.25 on an intra-day basis last Halloween.
You’ve heard of BYOB, now get ready for Bring Your Own Laptop. There’s a small but growing trend in which companies are choosing to give employees money toward their personal laptop, rather than providing a company-issued portable. British Petroleum is among the companies that is trying the approach.
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