Here’s a look back at VMware’s road to freedom in 2021 as it spun off from Dell Technologies into a $64 billion software giant.

“Thirty three of the top 100 most powerful supercomputers in the world were built by HPE. This is more than any company,” CEO Antonio Neri boasted.

Armis is the fastest growing cybersecurity software company; Ericsson stock is down nearly 6% since its Vonage acquisition; and Samsung plans to build a $17B semiconductor fab.

Compared to VMware, “we continue to see a higher win ratio and we are much more disciplined in terms of our execution,” Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said.

“We are in an age of explosive growth with respect to applications,” VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram said on the company’s third-quarter fiscal 2022 earnings call.

“We have room to get better in security, and the teams are working hard on that,” Chuck Robbins said. “There’s a lot of innovative work going on.”

“The data cloud at Snowflake is not an idea or a long-term goal,” Snowflake SVP Christian Kleinerman said. “It is a reality, it's happening today.”

Solo.io raised $135 million to reach unicorn status; Cisco acquired replex to bolster its observability platform; and Rakuten Mobile acquired Estmob.

Intel CFO George Davis announced his retirement; Ivanti named a new CEO; and Snyk appointed Sanjay Poonen to its board of directors.

Under the agreement, Dell Technologies shed its 81% stake in VMware, which is now a $64 billion independent software company.

The rate of growth in Amazon Web Services continues to climb, hitting a year-over-year increase of 39% during the third quarter of 2021.

Verizon plans to offer Fortinet’s SD-WAN platform; AMD reported $4.3B in Q3 revenue; and the Linkerd 2.11 update extends zero-trust security to Kubernetes environments.

“We could have grown faster without supply chain constraints,” CEO Pekka Lundmark said during Nokia's third quarter of 2021 earnings call.

“We delivered our fifth straight quarter of greater than 50% year-over-year revenue growth,” CEO Lisa Su boasted.

Intel committed to building an open ecosystem of technologies; IBM announced partnerships with Cisco and Palo Alto Networks; and Google’s cloud revenue jumped 45%.

"It's easy to imply that there's an extra 10% of revenue growth that did not happen due to supply constraints," CFO Ken Miller said.

“I think that the multi-cloud, multi-edge world is really how we built Azure in the first place,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said.

“Security continues to be an increasing area of focus and a differentiator for us,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.

Supply chain constraints, due in large part to a global semiconductor and substrate shortage, dogged the chipmaker in Q3.

CEO Börje Ekholm blamed the loss on retaliatory measures resulting from “decisions Sweden took to exclude Chinese vendors in the build-out of 5G networks in Sweden.”

“Well, I think the big winner is Michael [Dell],” analyst Zeus Kerravala said. “It’s not like he needs more money, but he stands to make a boatload of money.”

The move comes as companies in nearly every industry come under the pressure of the chip crunch, with many facing higher component prices and longer lead times.

HPE saw robust growth across most of its business units, with the company's Aruba intelligent edge business growing by the largest margin, up 27% year over year.

In an interview with SDxCentral, CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said Nutanix’s software transformation that it began in 2017 is complete.