Shares of VMWare (VMW) are down $2.58, or 2%, at $107.80 after the company this morning said its chief financial officer, Mark Peek, has left to server as CFO of Workday, a “cloud computing” startup making analytics software deployed on a hosted basis that has a lot of buzz on the Street of late.
The company also said its Q1 results were expected to “broadly” meet or exceed the forecast it offered back on January 23rd.
Peek has been a board member at Workday.
CEO Paul Maritz thanked Peek for taking the company public in 2007 and providing “a steady hand” over the years. He said Peek has “built a great team of finance and operations professionals.”
FBR Capital’s Daniel Ives, who has an Outperform rating on the shares and designates the stock a “Top Pick,” writes that investors are likely to be disappointed by the departure of someone who was “extremely well regarded,” and by a quarterly outlook that sounds like it may not have been the “home run” some were hoping for.
But he expects there were some strong aspects to the quarter just ended:
Fundamentally speaking, we believe VMware had a very strong bookings quarter (which should be front and center for investors) and is in the midst of a massive product cycle (vSphere 5.0) which puts some major tailwinds in the company�s sails heading into the rest of 2012. To this point, we hear of solid demand and resources for virtualization spending within IT budgets, as virtualization spending remains a high priority area, while vSphere 5.0 has put VMware in the driver’s seat to take server virtualization to the next level within many enterprises over the next few years.
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