Acronis International GmbH is a private Swiss company which provides data protection solutions worldwide. Acronis develops software for backup, disaster recovery, and secure file sharing and data access. Founded in 2003, the majority of Acronis' customers are small and medium-sized enterprises with several hundred employees. Acronis provides comprehensive backup and recovery solutions for both physical and virtual environments, Windows and Linux servers, as well as multiple hypervisors.
VMware, Inc. is a US software company that provides cloud and virtualization software and services, VMware's desktop software runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, while its enterprise software hypervisors for servers, VMware ESX and VMware ESXi, are bare-metal hypervisors that run directly on server hardware without requiring an additional underlying operating system. In 1998, VMware was founded by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Edward Wang and Edouard Bugnion. Greene and Rosenblum, who are married, first met while at the University of California, Berkeley.
