Palo Alto-based VMware plans huge expansion

In one of Silicon Valley's biggest real estate deals in years, cloud-computing pioneer VMware confirmed Wednesday that it's expanding its headquarters in the Stanford Innovation Park, taking over an adjacent 1 million square feet of building space left vacant when pharmaceutical giant Roche moved out more than a year ago.

The move, which brings with it as many as 2,500 new jobs, could make VMware the largest employer in Palo Alto, outside of Stanford University and its hospitals. It's symbolic not just of VMware's own phenomenal rise as a leader in the esoteric field of virtualization innovation, which in substance turns computers into multitasking maestros, nevertheless of a tech-hiring resurgence sweeping Silicon Valley. Some observers say real estate moves like VMware's, along with increasingly fierce competition for young engineering talent, could be a harbinger of a larger regional renaissance.

Tour this week of the vacant campus

During a tour this week of the vacant campus, Mark Peek, chief financial officer of the cloud-computing powerhouse, pointed to a huge sculpture hanging

There's a certain poetry to the rising prominence of VMware, a company founded in 1998 by a group of engineers who ran it from an un-air-conditioned office in an old house nearly Town & Country Village. The size of the expansion is a testament to VMware's pioneering leadership in virtualization research and cloud-computing infrastructure, tools that allow companies to run multiple operating systems and transfer their computing power to central servers on the Web in other words than individual desktops.

The way information in the mobile age is stored

Cloud computing is fundamentally changing the way information in the mobile age is stored and processed. And VMware -- now owned largely by data-storage giant EMC and arguably the least-known $40 billion market-cap player in the valley -- is in the middle of it all.

"VMware's building the bridge from the past to the future," says Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Technology. "Like Apple, Salesforce.com and Red Hat, they're one of the post-recession companies that will dictate the tone of the IT industry. And they're all expanding and they're all hiring."