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The first product, VMware Workstation, was delivered in May 1999, and the company entered the server market in 2001 with VMware GSX Server (hosted) and VMware ESX Server (hostless). The company was launched officially early in the second year, in February 1999, at the DEMO Conference organized by Chris Shipley.
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For the first year, VMware operated in stealth mode, with roughly 20 employees by the end of 1998.
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Edouard Bugnion remained the chief architect and CTO of VMware until 2005, and went on to found Nuova Systems (now part of Cisco). Greene and Rosenblum were both graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1998, VMware was founded by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Edward Wang and Edouard Bugnion.
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