From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

VMware, a company recently known only to hard-core technologists, debuted as the darling of Wall Street on Tuesday, with an opening-day surge that exceeded even Google’s historic 2004 launch.

Stock of the Palo Alto maker of “virtualization” software soared 76 percent, eclipsing Google’s 18 percent first-day gain. VMware’s value at closing was $19.1 billion – ranking it as Silicon Valley’s third-largest home-grown software company after Oracle and Adobe Systems. It was the largest initial public offering since Google achieved a $27 billion valuation.

As if that wasn’t enough, Citrix announced that it was paying $500m for Xensource, a fascinating virtualisation outfit that emerged from the Cambridge Computer Lab.