VMware expands European operations

VMware has opened an office in the United Kingdom as part of an effort to expand sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The company develops software that lets Intel-based computers run several instances of an operating system simultaneously. Mark Stradling, who for the last seven years built European business partner relationships for server software maker Citrix, will lead the office, VMware said Monday.

VMware, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up that was profitable in 2002, got its start selling software for workstations, for example letting programmers test out Web sites using many different combinations of operating systems and Web browsers. Increasingly, though, the company has been shifting its emphasis to servers that can be divided into several separate "virtual machines" with easily adjusted amounts of memory and processing power.