Business Trends Healthy for VMWare, But Stock to Remain Volatile; Reiterate Buy

7/9 - "In our opinion CEO Diane Greene parted ways as the VMW Board (dominated by EMC Management) decided not to spin out VMW for now. We do not believe that the departure of Ms. Greene has anything to do with reduction in full year revenue guidance...New CEO Paul Maritz is an outsider and we feel is unlikely to command the loyalty of the existing core VMW team which would be somewhat negative for VMW."

"We believe VMW’s competitive position remains very strong and the reduction in full year guidance has no relevance with any increase in expected competition from Microsoft’s Hyper-V."

"We believe that the reduction in full year revenue guidance from 50% to lessthan- 50% is probably because of (a) current macro conditions and (b) lack of ability to precisely estimate the growth rate of a rapidly growing entity. A mix shift to ELAs (enterprise license agreement) is also putting downward pressure on near-term license revenues, the impact of which may not have been anticipated earlier. In our opinion, the real battle in server virtualization is in automation and management where we do not anticipate Microsoft (MSFT: Nasdaq; Neutral) to gain any traction anytime soon."

"We would argue that spinning out VMW as a separate entity would maximize shareholder wealth for both EMC (EMC: NYSE; Buy) and VMW, although EMC management tends to disagree at this time. We are maintaining our Buy rating, keeping a longer-term view, although we do no foresee any near-term catalyst for the VMW stock."