&gt;Many large companies with their own datacenters are running off of bare metal, and this will be the trend going forward.<p>And on top that bare metal is ESXi. Not all companies run cloud services or large web-apps. Most run Exchange, database servers, SharePoint, CRM or ERP systems. For these companies virtualization is a way of saving rack space, while getting the benefits of redundancy, failover and the ability to quickly spin up a new server.<p>AWS is barely in the same business as vmware, even though Amazon would like to convince us otherwise. AWS is simply not an option for a ton of companies that don&#x27;t want their data leaving their premises.<p>Vmware could have a nice niche business just making ESXi, but I doubt their management want to be a niche business.