With much surprise yesterday Cisco announced a new investment in VMware, buying 500,000 shares from Intel for a value of $13,3 million.
The networking giant already invested $150 million in July 2007 just before the VMware IPO.
With this new equity stake acquisition Cisco owns 1,7% of the virtualization vendor.
The relationship between the two has progressively tightened because Cisco is developing the first virtual switch for VMware Infrastructure 4: the Nexus 1000V.
A lot of things are interesting in this move:
- Intel gave away its shares despite it’s rumored interest to acquire VMware (which may be the reason behind the removal of Diane Greene as CEO).
- Cisco continues to invest in VMware despite it’s rumored interest to acquire Citrix
- Cisco still doesn’t tell what hypervisor is using for its new WAAS 4.1 appliance but it seems unlikely that it’s ESX or ESXi.