Peter Christy

VMW

Infrastructure Home Run: Who says geeks can't make money any more with geeky stuff. In the much anticipated IPO VMware priced at $29 and then opened and traded in the low $50's creating a market cap north of $15B (an interesting good/bad news for parent EMC which had a closing market cap of $38B including their 90% share of VMW). What could be more geeky than virtualization infrastructure but that didn't keep the VMware team from turning technology that almost no one actually understands into one of the largest (and richest) software companies in record time. A tip of our hat to Diane and her team!

A Future Infrastructure IPO Star?

Our favorite Dayton-based venture is StrataCache with Chris Riegel quietly following up on the big (and failed) visions of the likes of Inktomi.  Recently we hear rumblings that some of the big investment banks have Chris in their sights as the next big band infrastructure IPO. If the valuations are anything reasonable then Chris could move to a much better part of Dayton (or perhaps even buy Dayton). Couldn't happen to a nicer guy too

Gold Found in the Riverbed

Our hats are off to our friends at Riverbed who pulled off a successful IPO wistfully reminiscent of the go-go days of the dot com period (was that really only six years ago?).  In the face of looming competition from the biggest of the big boys (Cisco and Microsoft) the Riverbed team kept their heads down and grew sales at an impressive rate resulting in a successful IPO well short of profitability loading the Riverbed cache coffers with fuel to turn that corner, leaving other investors like Tacit (acquired by Packeteer) quietly wringing their hands wondering if they made the right (albeit sensible) choice to sell out.