(Mark One)

For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2014

OR

For the transition period            from            to

Commission File Number 001-33622

_______________________________________________________

(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)

_______________________________________________________

(650) 427-5000

(Registrant's telephone number, including area code)

_____________________________________________________

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

Securities registered pursuant to section 12(g) of the Act:

None

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Indicate by a check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act.     Yes   ¨     No   x

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or Section 15(d) of the Act.     Yes   ¨     No   x

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days.    Yes   x     No   ¨

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically and posted on its corporate Web site, if any, every Interactive Data File required to be submitted and posted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit and post such files).    Yes   x     No   ¨

Indicate by check mark if disclosure of delinquent filers pursuant to Item 405 of Regulation S-K is not contained herein, and will not be contained, to the best of registrant's knowledge, in definitive proxy or information statements incorporated by reference in Part III of this Form 10-K or any amendment to this Form 10-K.  x

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, or a smaller reporting company. See the definitions of "large accelerated filer," "accelerated filer" and "smaller reporting company" in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act).    Yes   ¨     No   x

At June 30, 2014, the aggregate market value of the registrant's Class A common stock held by non-affiliates of the registrant (based upon the closing sale price of such shares on the New York Stock Exchange on June 30, 2014) was approximately $8,398,288,024. Shares of the registrant's Class A common stock and Class B common stock held by each executive officer and director and by each entity or person, other than investment companies, that, to the registrant's knowledge, owned 5% or more of the registrant's outstanding Class A common stock as of June 30, 2014 have been excluded in that such persons may be deemed to be affiliates of the registrant. This determination of affiliate status is not necessarily a conclusive determination for other purposes.

As of February 20, 2015 , the number of shares of common stock, par value $0.01 per share, of the registrant outstanding was 427,616,585 of which 127,616,585 shares were Class A common stock and 300,000,000 were Class B common stock.

DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE

Information required in response to Part III of Form 10-K (Items 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14) is hereby incorporated by reference to portions of the registrant's Proxy Statement for the Annual Meeting of Stockholders to be held in 2015. The Proxy Statement will be filed by the registrant with the Securities and Exchange Commission no later than 120 days after the end of the registrant's fiscal year ended December 31, 2014.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

VMware, VMworld, vSphere, vCloud, vCenter, VMware View, vCloud Suite, Horizon Suite, VMware NSX, Virtual SAN, vCloud Air, vSphere Replication, vCenter Site Recovery Manager, VMware Fusion, vMotion, Horizon, vRealize, vRealize Operations, vRealize Automation, Horizon Air, VMware Ready, EVO: RAIL, CloudVolumes, AirWatch, Desktone, Dynamic Ops, Nicira, and Virsto are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware or its subsidiaries in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Forward-Looking Statements

This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements regarding expectations of, or our plans for: our vision and expected benefits of the Software-Defined Data Center; newer products and services driving strong growth; maintaining our industry leadership position; benefits of our products and services to customers and partners; sales of licenses that include products beyond VMware vSphere hypervisor continuing to grow; increased sales of our non-standalone vSphere products; software-as-a-service ("SaaS") revenues and revenues from our hybrid cloud offerings comprising an increasing percentage of our revenues in future periods; expected growth of hybrid cloud and SaaS revenues in 2015 and the associated negative impact on revenues and license revenues growth; synergies across product areas; increased total costs of services revenues; investment in research and development; future competition; the impact and timing of our realignment plan on our financial results; future amortization of software development costs; the recognition of unearned revenues; the impact of our relationship with EMC Corporation on taxes; repurchasing at least one billion dollars of Class A common stock in 2015; customer and partner demand for our products and services; synergies from our acquisitions and associated accounting for goodwill; the sufficiency of our liquidity and capital reserves to fund our operations and business strategy; our ability to generate positive cash flows from operations; the impact of the AirWatch acquisition on cash provided by operating activities; continuation of our stock repurchase program; expectations that stock-based compensation will increase in future periods; our effective tax rate and the effects of potential developments in U.S. and non-U.S. tax jurisdictions; the timing and outcome of the IRS tax audit of the EMC consolidated group; the amount of any unrecognized tax benefit; acquisition accounting and the deductibility of goodwill and identifiable intangible assets for U.S. income tax purposes; utilization of net operating loss carryforwards; anticipation that we will not declare and cash dividends; indefinitely reinvesting our overseas earnings outside of the U.S. and not repatriating them to the U.S.; adequacy of our current facilities and the availability of additional or substitute space for future expansion; the lack of a material effect on us due to the resolution of pending claims, legal proceedings and investigations, including the General Services Administration and Department of Justice inquiries; and impact of foreign currency exchange rates on future revenues.

These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and the cautionary statements set forth above and those contained in the section of this report entitled "Risk Factors" identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted in any such forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements in this document are made as of the date hereof, based on information available to us as of the date hereof. We assume no obligation to, and do not currently intend to, update these forward-looking statements.

PART I

Overview

VMware, Inc. ("VMware") is the leader in virtualization infrastructure solutions utilized by organizations to help transform the way they build, deliver and consume information technology ("IT") resources. We develop and market our product and service offerings within three main product groups, and we also leverage synergies across these three product areas.

We pioneered the development and application of virtualization technologies with x86 server-based computing, separating application software from the underlying hardware. The benefits to our customers include lower IT costs and a more automated and resilient systems infrastructure capable of responding dynamically to variable business demands. Our broad and proven suite of virtualization technologies are designed to establish secure and reliable IT environments and address a range of complex IT challenges that include cost reduction, operational inefficiencies, access to cloud computing capacity, business continuity and corporate end-user computing device management. Our solutions enable organizations to aggregate multiple servers, storage infrastructure and networks together into shared pools of capacity that can be allocated dynamically, securely and reliably to applications as needed. Once created, these internal computing infrastructures, or "clouds," can be dynamically extended by our customers to the public cloud environment. When linked, this results in a "hybrid" computing cloud of highly available internal and external computing resources that organizations can access on demand. Our customers' deployments range in size from a single virtualized server for small businesses to thousands of virtual machines for our Fortune 1000 enterprise customers.

We believe that our solutions enable organizations to realize significant operational and cost efficiencies as they transition their underlying legacy IT infrastructure. We work closely with more than 1,100 technology partners, including leading server, microprocessor, storage, networking, software and security vendors. We have shared the economic opportunities surrounding virtualization with our partners by facilitating solution development through open application programming interface ("APIs") formats and protocols and providing access to our source code and technology. The endorsement and support of our partners further enhances the awareness, reputation and adoption of our virtualization solutions.

In 2014, we acquired AirWatch, a leader in enterprise mobile management and security, which expands our solutions within the enterprise mobile management and security spaces.

We have developed a multi-channel distribution model to expand our presence and reach various segments of the market. We derive the majority of our revenues from our indirect sales channel, which includes distributors, resellers, system vendors and systems integrators. We believe that our partners benefit greatly from the sale of our solutions through additional services, software and hardware sales opportunities. We have trained a large number of partners and end users to deploy and leverage our solutions.

We incorporated in Delaware in 1998, were acquired by EMC in 2004 and conducted our initial public offering of our Class A common stock in August 2007. EMC holds approximately 79.9% of our outstanding common stock, including 43 million shares of our Class A common stock as of December 31, 2014 , and all of our Class B common stock, and we are considered a "controlled company" under the rules of the New York Stock Exchange. Total revenues in 2014 increased 16% to $6,035 million . This included license revenues of $2,591 million and services revenues of $3,444 million . Of our total services revenues in 2014, 88% comprised software maintenance revenues and the remaining 12% was comprised of professional services revenues, including training. For additional financial information on our business by product and geographic area, refer to Note O to the consolidated financial statements in Part II, Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Our corporate headquarters are located at 3401 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, California, and we have approximately 114 offices worldwide.

Products and Technology

Software-Defined Data Center

VMware was the first company to articulate a vision for the software-defined data center ("SDDC"), where increasingly infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service, enabling control of the data center to be entirely automated by software. Traditional data centers are loose collections of technology silos where each application type has its own vertical stack consisting of a CPU and operating system, storage pool, networking and security, and management systems. Over time, costs to maintain the data center infrastructure have been increasing because the data center environment has become divergent, leading to higher complexity. The increased complexity of the data center demands constantly increasing resources to manage and

maintain the IT infrastructure. The SDDC is designed to transform the data center into an on-demand service that addresses application requirements by abstracting, pooling and automating the services that are required from the underlying hardware. SDDC promises to dramatically simplify data center operations and lower costs.

Our SDDC architecture consists of four main product categories:

Compute

VMware vSphere, our flagship data center platform, provides the fundamental compute layer for VMware environments. A "hypervisor" is a layer of software that resides between the operating system and system hardware to enable compute virtualization. Users deploy the VMware vSphere hypervisor when they purchase VMware vSphere or suite versions that include vSphere, such as VMware vCloud Suites and vSphere with Operations Management ("vSOM"). Sales of VMware licenses that include products beyond the VMware vSphere hypervisor have continued to grow.

Storage and Availability

We provide many storage and availability products to offer cost-effective holistic data storage and protection options to all applications running on the vSphere platform. Key technologies in this area include:

Network and Security

Network virtualization abstracts physical networks and greatly simplifies the provisioning and consumption of networking resources. In addition, security services are built in, do not require purpose-built hardware, and can scale with the network. Our network virtualization solution is VMware NSX, which was launched in the third quarter of 2013. Sales volumes of VMware NSX continued to grow during 2014 as VMware NSX was increasingly introduced into production environments. While the market for network virtualization continues to be in an early stage, we believe that network virtualization product offerings, including VMware NSX, have the potential to be as transformational for networks as server virtualization has been for computing.

Management and Automation

Our management and automation products move beyond core infrastructure to manage and automate overarching IT processes involved in provisioning IT services and resources to users from initial infrastructure deployment to retirement. These IT processes manage virtualized and non-virtualized infrastructure resources and private and public cloud infrastructures, including hybrid cloud services. Examples of products in the management and automation product portfolio include:

Software-Defined Data Center Suites

Our SDDC offerings are available separately or may be acquired in a single solution. The VMware vCloud Suite, VMware vSphere with Operations Management, and VMware vRealize suite are integrated solutions for building and managing a complete cloud infrastructure optimized for use with the VMware vSphere platform. VMware vCloud Suite is designed to fulfill the promise of the software-defined data center by pooling industry-standard hardware and running compute, networking and management functions in the data center as software-defined services. VMware vSphere with Operations Management allows users to optimize capacity and monitor the workload performance of their vSphere environments. The VMware vRealize suite is a cloud management platform that extends vCloud Suite capabilities beyond a vSphere private cloud environment to both heterogeneous and hybrid cloud environments.

The following products are available in different configurations of our VMware vCloud Suite offerings:

The following products are available in different configurations of our VMware vSphere with Operations Management offerings:

The following products are available in different configurations of our VMware vRealize suite offerings:

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure -In addition to our SDDC main product categories, we launched EVO:RAIL during the second half of 2014. EVO:RAIL is our first solution that combines VMware compute, networking, and storage resources into a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance enabling easy virtual machine deployment.

Hybrid Cloud Computing

We enable our customers to utilize off-premise vSphere-based hybrid cloud computing capacity through three programs: VMware vCloud Air, VMware vCloud Air Network Service Providers and vCloud Air Business Ventures.

VMware vCloud Air, built on the foundation of VMware's vSphere, is a public cloud operated by us that includes infrastructure, disaster recovery, and various applications as service offerings, and which provides customers with a common platform to seamlessly extend their data center to the cloud. VMware vCloud Air enables customers to extend the same skills, tools, networking and security models across both on-premise and off-premise environments.

Our VMware vCloud Air Network Service Providers program is directed to hosting and cloud computing vendors, enabling organizations to choose between running applications in virtual machines on their own "private clouds" inside their data center or on "public clouds" hosted by a service provider.

Our VMware vCloud Air Business Ventures is a program primarily developed to expand VMware vCloud Air globally, by partnering and co-investing with large in-country telecommunication providers in order to enable a user experience consistent with VMware's owned and operated vCloud Air Service.

End-User Computing ("EUC")

Our End-User Computing strategy enables IT organizations to efficiently deliver more secure access to data, applications and devices to end users-thus providing them a virtual workspace to work in an increasingly mobile-cloud era. Our EUC solutions are led by the workspace suite, which brings together desktop, mobile, content and underlying services such as identity management and social collaboration, in order to provide a software-defined workspace that complements our software-defined data center solutions. Our solutions provide corporate end users with choice in access to their applications, content and data in a user-friendly environment-all while allowing corporate IT appropriate control over the computing environment with high-quality service, improved availability and scalable performance-either on-premise or in hybrid clouds.

Our workspace suite includes:

Desktop Solutions

Enterprise Mobility

We acquired AirWatch during the first quarter of 2014. AirWatch provides a portfolio of solutions for managing mobile devices, applications and content while also securing mobile email, securing browsing across any device, and providing telecom analytics and other key modules.

Our mobile offerings are sold both as perpetual licenses and as software-as-a-service ("SaaS"). AirWatch provides the core foundation to support an increasingly mobile workforce and customer base, enabling VMware and AirWatch customers to take advantage of "bring your own device" initiatives.

AirWatch Enterprise Mobile Management ("EMM") capabilities include:

Content Collaboration

AirWatch by VMware's Secure Content Locker provides a leading enterprise file sync and share solution that extends Mobile Content Management to secure access of content on any device, desktop or mobile, while allowing the content to be stored in any federated data-store whether on-premise or in the cloud, e.g. SharePoint, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive or other stores. Our content collaboration solutions also include Socialcast, our enterprise social computing solution that allow users to complement their use of email with rich communication in consumer-grade experiences.

Workspace Services

Our EUC portfolio also includes a complete set of underlying platform-like Workspace Services that support the entire set of solutions and mobile and desktop users. These include Workspace Portal, a single sign-on identity service, to deliver applications, desktops and data in a single portal of entry, and other services like gateway and analytics, which provide a common set of platform services for all VMware EUC products.

Technology Alliances

Consistent with our partner-centric strategy, we have engaged a broad group of hardware, software and cloud computing service vendors to cooperatively advance virtualization technology through joint marketing, product interoperability, collaboration and co-development. We create opportunity for partners by enabling them to build products that utilize our virtualization technology and create differentiated value through joint solutions.

We have more than 1,100 technology partners with whom we bring joint offerings to the marketplace and over 4,000 active service provider partners. We classify our partners as follows:

Our Technology Alliance Partner program facilitates joint solution creation and coordinated go-to-market activities with our partners. Over 4,500 of the most widely used applications from ISVs support the VMware vSphere platform. These applications include business solutions for enterprise resource planning, human resource management, electronic medical records management, financial processing and middleware, such as application servers and databases. As an extension to this rapidly growing list, we have expanded our VMware Ready program to allow application software and desktop solution

providers to qualify for the VMware Ready logo. The VMware Ready Desktop Solutions program validates the reference architecture and desktop specialization of solution providers that simplify VMware virtual desktop environments.

Our ISVs and other alliance partners, developers and additional VMware community members have distributed more than 1,700 software applications as virtual appliances. We invest significant capital in testing and certification of infrastructure to rigorously ensure our software works well with major hardware and software products. We have certified approximately 12,700 servers, storage, I/O and thin-client devices that are VMware Ready. We have successfully tested approximately 670 operating system versions for use with our solutions. We believe that the scale and scope of this effort is a significant competitive advantage.

Research and Development

We have made, and expect to continue to make, significant investments in research and development ("R&D"). We have assembled an experienced group of developers with system level, systems management, desktop, mobile devices, security, application development, collaborative applications, networking, storage and open source software expertise. We also have strong ties to leading academic institutions around the world, and we invest in joint research with academia.

We prioritize our product development efforts through a combination of engineering-driven innovation and customer and market-driven feedback. Our R&D culture places high value on innovation, quality and open collaboration with our partners. We currently participate in numerous standards groups and VMware employees hold a variety of standards organization leadership positions, including with the Distributed Management Task Force, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, the Open Networking Foundation and the Open Stack Foundation.

Our R&D expenses totaled $1,239 million , $1,082 million , and $999 million in 2014, 2013 and 2012, respectively.

Sales and Marketing

We derive the majority of our sales from our indirect sales channel, which includes distributors, resellers, system vendors and systems integrators. The remainder of our sales is primarily derived from our direct sales force.

We have established ongoing business relationships with our distributors. Our distributors purchase software licenses and software support from us for resale to end-user customers via resellers.

A substantial majority of our resellers obtain software licenses and software support from our distributors and market and sell them to our end-user customers. These resellers are part of our VMware Partner Network ("VPN"), which offers these resellers sales and product training, pricing incentives, rebates and access to the worldwide network of VMware distributors and the VMware Partner Central Web portal.

We offer several levels of membership in our VPN depending on a reseller's interest and capability of providing demand generation, fulfillment, service delivery and education to customers and prospects. We also have certain resellers, as well as systems integrators, who obtain software licenses and software support directly from VMware. The VPN agreements signed by the resellers carry no obligation to purchase or sell VMware products and can be terminated at any time by either party.

We have a highly leveraged go-to-market strategy that includes a direct sales force that is complementary to our channel. Our sales force works with our channel partners to introduce them to end-user customer accounts and new sales opportunities.

In addition, our channel partner network includes certain systems integrators and resellers trained and certified to deliver consulting services and solutions leveraging VMware products.

We generally do not have long-term contracts or minimum purchase commitments with our distributors, resellers, system vendors and systems integrators, and our contracts with these channel partners do not prohibit them from offering products or services that compete with ours.

We continue to primarily sell our software under perpetual licenses. However, our hybrid cloud and SaaS offerings, including certain AirWatch offerings, are sold as software-as-a-service or pay-as-you-go and generally result in less revenue being recognized up-front than we would otherwise recognize as part of a multi-year license arrangement. Sales of perpetual licenses require end-user customers to also purchase maintenance. Software maintenance and renewals are sold both directly to end-user customers and via our network of channel partners. The majority of professional services are sold via our channel, with some professional services sold directly. End users can obtain licenses to our products through individual discrete purchases to meet their immediate needs or through the adoption of enterprise license agreements ("ELAs"). ELAs are comprehensive volume license offerings that provide for multi-year maintenance and support at discounted prices. ELAs enable us to build long-term relationships with our customers as they commit to our virtual infrastructure solutions in their data centers. Our sales cycle can vary greatly depending on numerous factors, including the size and complexity of the proposed offering and customer's infrastructure.

In establishing list prices for our products, we take into account, among other numerous factors, the value our products and solutions deliver and the cost of both alternative virtualization and hardware solutions.

Our marketing efforts focus on communicating the benefits of our solutions and educating our customers, distributors, resellers, system vendors, systems integrators, the media and analysts about the advantages of our innovative virtualization technology.

We raise awareness of our company and brands, market our products and generate sales leads through VMware and industry events, public relations efforts, marketing materials, advertising, direct marketing, social media initiatives, free downloads and our website. We have invested in multiple online communities that enable customers and partners to share and discuss sales and development resources, best practices implementation, and industry trends among other topics. Our annual user conference, VMworld, is held in both the U.S. and Europe. We also offer management presentations, seminars, and webinars on our products of virtualization and cloud computing. We believe the combination of these activities strengthens our brand and enhances our leading market position in our industry.

Our business is subject to seasonality in the sale of our products and services. For example, our fourth quarter revenues are affected by a number of seasonal factors, including fiscal year-end spending trends. Such factors historically have contributed to stronger fourth quarter revenues in any given year. We believe that seasonal factors are common within our industry.

Customers

Our customer deployments range in size from a single virtualized server for small businesses to thousands of virtual machines for our largest enterprise customers.

During 2014, three distributors, who purchased software licenses and software support from us for resale to end-user customers directly or via resellers, each accounted for over 10% of our consolidated revenues. Arrow Electronics, Inc., Tech Data Corporation and Ingram Micro, Inc. accounted for 15% , 13% and 11% , respectively, of our consolidated revenues in 2014. Our distribution agreements are typically terminable at will by either party upon 30 to 90 days' prior written notice to the other party, and neither party has any obligation to purchase or sell any products under the agreement.

Competition

The cloud computing, end-user computing and virtualization spaces are inter-related and rapidly evolving. We experienced increased competition during 2014 and expect it to significantly intensify in the future. We compete with large and small vendors in different segments of the cloud computing, end-user computing and virtualization spaces, and expect that new entrants will continue to enter these industries and develop technologies that, if commercialized, may compete with our products and services.

We believe the key competitive factors in the cloud computing, end-user computing and virtualization spaces include:

Our vSphere-based data center virtualization product offerings are central to our SDDC product suites and remain essential to our business strategy. Microsoft continues to be a primary competitor for data center virtualization solutions. We also compete with open source based solutions based on the OpenStack platform as well as emerging container technologies like Docker and Rocket. Additionally, we compete with Citrix and its collaborations with Microsoft for end-user computing solutions. With our entry into network virtualization we are experiencing additional competition predominantly from Cisco.

Our management and automation product offerings that we market as part of our VMware vCloud Suites provide customers alternatives to offerings from established IT management vendors, such as BMC, CA, HP and IBM, as well as many new entrants that are trying to penetrate the nascent, higher growth cloud management markets.

During 2014, we expanded our hybrid cloud computing offerings and footprint, and rebranded our vCloud hybrid cloud services ("vCHS") to VMware vCloud Air. The cloud computing industry is dynamic with both established and new technology companies vying for thought leadership and market share. With the launch of VMware vCloud Air, we now directly compete with infrastructure-as-a-service offerings from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM and emerging open source efforts. These cloud providers also present alternatives to VMware's on-premises data center footprint and compete against our hybrid cloud computing vision.

As we grow and increase the breadth of our product portfolio, we naturally encounter additional competition. Companies that are core partners can become, over time, competitors. This cooperative competition is very common in the tech industry and is also known in the common parlance as "coopetition." This kind of competition can occur when we have alliances with vendors and partners that cover one part of our business or geographical area, yet we compete with such partners in other businesses or other geographies or countries.

We actively work to segregate those parts of our business that compete with certain vendors or partners from those that partner with such companies and employ the usual tools and protocols widely used by other firms to manage this potential conflict of interest, including the use of confidentiality agreements and business function separation and segregation.

We are also competing with new entrants to the cloud computing, end-user computing and virtualization spaces, which may include parties currently selling our products and our current technology partners. Existing and future competitors may introduce products in the same areas we serve or intend to serve, and competing products may have better performance, lower prices, better functionality and broader acceptance than our products. Our competitors may also add features to their cloud computing, end-user computing and virtualization products that are similar to features that presently differentiate our product offerings from theirs. Additionally, some of our competitors may make acquisitions or enter into partnerships or other strategic relationships with one another to offer more comprehensive solutions than those they individually had offered. Some competitors have in the past, and may in the future, take advantage of their existing relationships with our business partners to engage in business practices such as support, distribution and license restrictions that make our products less attractive to our channel partners and end users.

Additionally, information technology companies are also increasingly seeking to deliver end-to-end IT solutions to end users that combine enterprise-level hardware and software solutions in a converged infrastructure platform for private cloud computing. In addition, competitors who have existing relationships with our current or prospective end users could integrate competitive capabilities into their existing products and make them available without additional charge. Many of our current and potential competitors have longer operating histories, greater name recognition, a larger customer base and significantly greater financial, technical, sales and marketing and other resources than we do. Overall however, we believe our market position, large virtualization customer base, strong network of partners and indirect sales, broad and innovative solutions suite, and platform-agnostic approach position us to compete effectively.

Intellectual Property

As of December 31, 2014, approximately 600 patents issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office have been granted or assigned to us. We also have been granted or assigned patents from other countries. These patents cover various aspects of our server virtualization and other technologies. The granted United States patents will expire beginning in 2018, with the last patent expiring in 2033. We also have numerous pending United States provisional and non-provisional patent

applications, and numerous pending foreign and international patent applications, that cover other aspects of our virtualization and other technologies.

We have federal trademark registrations in the United States for "VMWARE," "VMWORLD," "VMWARE FUSION," "VSPHERE," "VMWARE VCLOUD," "VMWARE VIEW," "VMOTION," "HORIZON," "AIRWATCH" and numerous other trademarks. We have also registered trademarks in a number of foreign countries.

We rely on a combination of patent, trademark, copyright and trade secret laws in the United States and other jurisdictions, as well as confidentiality procedures and contractual provisions to protect our intellectual property rights and our brand.

We enforce our intellectual property rights in the United States and a number of foreign countries. Despite our efforts, the steps we have taken to protect our proprietary rights may not be adequate to preclude misappropriation of our proprietary information or infringement of our intellectual property rights, and our ability to police such misappropriation or infringement is uncertain, particularly in countries outside of the United States. United States patent filings are intended to provide the holder with a right to exclude others from making, using, offering to sell, selling or importing into the United States products covered by the claims of granted patents.

Our granted United States patents, and any future patents (to the extent they are issued), may be contested, circumvented or invalidated in the future. Moreover, the rights granted under any issued patents may not provide us with proprietary protection or competitive advantages, and we may not be able to prevent third parties from infringing these patents. Therefore, the exact effect of our patents and the other steps we have taken to protect our intellectual property cannot be predicted with certainty.

Employees

As of December 31, 2014, we had approximately 18,000 employees in offices worldwide, less than 5% of which were contracted through EMC. None of our employees are represented by labor unions, and we consider current employee relations to be good.

We contract with EMC to utilize personnel who are dedicated to work for VMware on a full-time basis. These individuals are located in countries in which we do not currently have an operating subsidiary and are predominantly dedicated to our sales and marketing efforts. We use contractors from time to time for temporary assignments and in locations in which we do not currently have operating subsidiaries. In the event that these contractor resources were not available, we do not believe that this would have a material adverse effect on our operations.

Available Information

Our website is located at www.vmware.com, and our investor relations website is located at http://ir.vmware.com. Our goal is to maintain the Investor Relations website as a portal through which investors can easily find or navigate to pertinent information about us, all of which is made available free of charge, including:

The information found on our website is not part of, and is not incorporated by reference into, this or any other report we file with, or furnish to, the SEC.

The risk factors that appear below could materially affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. The risks and uncertainties described below are not the only risks and uncertainties facing us. Our business is also subject to general risks and uncertainties that affect many other companies. Specific risk factors related to our relationship with EMC are also included below.

Risks Related to Our Business

As the markets for our server and desktop virtualization products have matured we have been increasingly developing and marketing products and services targeted toward the delivery, management and automation of information technology ("IT") infrastructure, platforms and services through cloud-based solutions. If businesses do not find our cloud computing solutions compelling, our revenue growth and operating margins will decline.

Our products and services are based on server virtualization and related technologies that have primarily been used for virtualizing on-premise data center servers and form the foundation for private cloud computing. As the market for data center server virtualization has matured, we have increasingly directed our product development and marketing toward products and services that enable businesses to utilize virtualization as the foundation for cloud-based computing. We have extended the benefits of virtualization beyond servers to include network and storage, and coupled this with management and automated delivery of IT resources to create private cloud platforms. We have also extended our product portfolio beyond desktop virtualization to include mobile device management with our AirWatch offerings. We also offer hybrid cloud services through our vCloud Air platform.

Our success depends on our current and future customers perceiving technological and operational benefits and cost savings associated with the increasing adoption of our private and hybrid cloud solutions as well as our client virtualization and mobile device management solutions. As the market for our server virtualization products matures and the scale of our business increases, our rate of revenue growth will depend largely upon the success of our newer product and service offerings. In addition, to the extent that our newer private and hybrid cloud solutions, as well as our client virtualization and mobile device management solutions are adopted more slowly or less comprehensively than we expect, our revenue growth rates may slow materially or our revenue may decline substantially.

The large majority of our revenues have come from our server virtualization products including our flagship VMware vSphere product line. Decreases in demand for our server virtualization products could adversely affect our results of operations and financial condition.

The large majority of our revenues have come from our server virtualization products. Although we continue to develop other applications for our virtualization technology such as our network virtualization solution, VMware NSX, end-user computing products and hybrid cloud services and expand our offerings into related areas such as our vRealize SDDC management products and vCloud product suites, we expect that our server virtualization products and related enhancements and upgrades will constitute a majority of our revenues for the foreseeable future. Declines and variability in demand for our data center virtualization products could occur as a result of:

Also, as more and more businesses achieve the virtualization of their servers, certain markets for our VMware vSphere product line have matured. Our sales of standalone VMware vSphere have declined as a portion of our overall business as we seek to transition our customers to product suites, our newer products and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings. If we fail to introduce compelling new features in future upgrades to our VMware vSphere product line, manage the transition to hybrid cloud platforms, develop new applications for our virtualization technology or provide product suites based on the VMware vSphere platform that address customer requirements for integration, automation and management of their IT systems, overall demand for products and services based on VMware vSphere may decline.

Due to our product concentration, our business, financial condition, results of operations, and cash flows would therefore be adversely affected by a decline in demand for our data center virtualization products.

We expect to face increasing competition that could result in a loss of customers, reduced revenues or decreased operating margins.

The virtualization, cloud computing, end-user computing and software-defined data center industries are inter-related and rapidly evolving. We experienced increased competition during 2014 and expect it to remain intense going forward. For example, Microsoft continues to improve its virtual infrastructure and virtual management products and is expected to release updated versions of its Hyper V virtualization product and CloudOS private cloud platform. Microsoft also offers IaaS capabilities in Azure with a similar hybrid cloud message. We also face competition from other companies that have announced a number of new product initiatives, alliances and consolidation efforts. For example, Citrix Systems continues to enhance its end-user desktop and mobility offerings and their networking and cloud platform offerings. IBM, Google and Amazon have existing cloud computing offerings and announced new cloud computing initiatives. Additionally, open source technologies for virtualization, containerization, and cloud platforms such as Xen, KVM, Docker, Rocket, and OpenStack provide significant pricing competition, and enable competing vendors to leverage open source technologies like OpenStack to compete directly with our SDDC initiative. Enterprises and service providers have also shown significant interest in building their own clouds based on open source projects such as OpenStack. Other companies have indicated their intention to expand offerings of virtual management and cloud computing solutions as well. Additionally, our hybrid cloud computing offering, which allows enterprises to pool internal and external IT resources running on a common vSphere infrastructure, competes with low-cost public cloud infrastructure offerings such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer and Google Compute Engine.

Following our acquisition of Nicira and the resulting release of our NSX product, a number of competitors announced software-defined networking offerings. For example, Cisco announced its Application Centric Infrastructure initiative.

We believe that the key competitive factors in the virtualization and cloud computing spaces include:

Existing and future competitors may introduce products and services in the same areas we serve or intend to serve, and competing products and services may have better performance, lower prices, better functionality and broader acceptance than our products and services. Our competitors may also add features to their virtualization, end-user and cloud computing products similar to features that presently differentiate our product offerings from theirs. Many of our current or potential competitors also have longer operating histories, greater name recognition, larger customer bases and significantly greater financial, technical, sales, marketing and other resources than we do. This competition could result in increased pricing pressure and sales and marketing expenses, thereby materially reducing our operating margins, and could also prevent our new products and services from gaining market acceptance, thereby harming our ability to increase, or causing us to lose, market share.

Increased competition also may prevent us from entering into or renewing service contracts on terms similar to those that we currently offer and may cause the length of our sales cycle to increase. Additionally, some of our competitors and potential competitors supply a wide variety of products and services to, and have well-established relationships with, our current and prospective end users. For example, small to medium sized businesses and companies in emerging markets that are evaluating the adoption of virtualization-based technologies and solutions may be inclined to consider Microsoft solutions because of their existing use of Windows and Office products. Some of these competitors have in the past and may in the future take advantage

of their existing relationships to engage in business practices that make our products and services less attractive to our end users. Other competitors have limited or denied support for their applications running in VMware virtualization environments. These distribution, licensing and support restrictions, as well as other business practices that may be adopted in the future by our competitors, could materially impact our prospects regardless of the merits of our products and services.

In addition, competitors with existing relationships with our current or prospective end users could in the future integrate competitive capabilities into their existing products and services and make them available without additional charge. For example, Oracle provides free server virtualization software intended to support Oracle and non-Oracle applications, and Microsoft offers its own server virtualization software packaged with its Windows Server product and offers built-in virtualization in the client version of Windows. As a result, existing and prospective VMware customers may elect to use products that are perceived to be "free" or "very low cost" instead of purchasing VMware products and services for certain applications where they do not believe that more advanced and robust capabilities are required. Competitors may also leverage open source technologies to offer zero or low cost products and services capable of putting pricing pressure on our own product offerings. By engaging in such business practices, our competitors can diminish competitive advantages we may possess by incentivizing end users to choose products that lack some of the technical advantages of our own offerings. In addition, even if customers find our products and services to be technically superior, they may choose to employ a " multiple-vendor " strategy, where they purposely deploy multiple vendors in their environment in order to prevent any one vendor from gaining too much control over their IT operations.

We also face potential competition from our partners. For example, third parties currently selling our products and services could build and market their own competing products and services or market competing products and services of other vendors. If we are unable to compete effectively, our growth and our ability to sell products and services at profitable margins could be materially and adversely affected, which could materially and adversely impact our financial condition and results of operations.

Industry alliances or consolidation may result in increased competition.

Some of our competitors have made acquisitions and entered into or extended partnerships or other strategic relationships to offer more comprehensive virtualization and cloud computing solutions than they individually had offered. Citrix Systems continues to invest in desktop virtualization marketing by continuing its collaboration with Microsoft and has acquired smaller players like Zenprise, Virtual Computer and Framehawk. IBM acquired SoftLayer to increase their data center footprint and grow their cloud business. Moreover, information technology companies are increasingly seeking to deliver top-to-bottom IT solutions to end users that combine enterprise-level hardware and software solutions to provide an alternative to our virtualization platform. For example, Oracle offers integrated hardware and software virtualization solutions, and Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard continue their collaboration based on Microsoft's cloud computing and virtualization platforms. In addition, Citrix offers an IaaS cloud services solution, and Red Hat continues to invest in the Open Virtualization Alliance ("OVA") to bolster KVM as a direct competitor to VMware vSphere.

A number of competitors are active in the emerging software-defined networking space. For example, in 2013, Cisco acquired Insieme. In June 2013, Oracle and Microsoft entered into a partnership pursuant to which Oracle now supports the use of Oracle products in Microsoft Hyper-V deployments as well as Windows Azure. In July 2014, Cisco and Microsoft announced an initiative to integrate Cisco data center solutions and networking switches with Microsoft cloud offerings and to jointly market and sell their data center and hybrid cloud solutions. In September 2014, Cisco and RedHat announced a new integrated infrastructure solution for OpenStack-based cloud deployments. In addition, the companies announced an expansion of their relationship, accelerating collaboration around OpenStack, Application Centric Infrastructure and Intercloud. We expect these trends to continue as companies attempt to strengthen or maintain their positions in the evolving virtualization infrastructure and enterprise IT solutions industry. Many of the companies driving this trend have significantly greater financial, technical and other resources than we do and may be better positioned to acquire and offer complementary products and technologies. The companies and alliances resulting from these possible combinations may create more compelling product and service offerings and be able to offer greater pricing flexibility than we can or may engage in business practices that make it more difficult for us to compete effectively, including on the basis of price, sales and marketing programs (such as providing greater incentives to our channel partners to sell a competitor's product), technology or product functionality. This competition could result in a substantial loss of customers or a reduction in our revenues, which could materially and adversely impact our financial condition and results of operations.

Our new product and technology initiatives subject us to additional business, legal and competitive risks.

Over the last several years, we have introduced new product and technology initiatives that aim to leverage our virtualization infrastructure software products into the emerging areas of cloud computing and end-user computing as alternatives to the provisioning of physical computing resources.

One of our core strategies is to deliver the software-defined data center. In 2012, we acquired two companies that furthered our software defined data center ( " SDDC") strategy-Dynamic Ops, a provider of cloud automation solutions that enable

provisioning and management of IT services across heterogeneous environments, and Nicira, a developer of software-defined networking and a leader in network virtualization for open source initiatives. In 2013, we acquired Virsto Software, a developer of software that optimizes storage performance and utilization in virtual environments. These acquired technologies, combined with existing technologies, constitute the basis for our SDDC private cloud offerings.

We also continue to expand and enhance our end-user computing offerings, such as VMware View and Horizon Suite, a solution that provides end users with a single place to get access to their applications, data and desktops and gives IT a single management console to manage entitlements, policies and security.

In the second quarter of 2013, we introduced our hybrid cloud service called vCloud Air (formerly, vCloud Hybrid Service). vCloud Air is designed to deliver a public cloud as a service offering that is interoperable with our customers' existing VMware virtualized infrastructure, enabling customers to extend the same skills, tools, networking and security models across both on-premise and off-premise environments.

In the first quarter of 2014, we acquired AirWatch, a leader in enterprise mobility management and security solutions. The acquisition of AirWatch expands our portfolio of mobile solutions within the enterprise mobility and security space.

In the third quarter of 2014, we announced that we had entered into a joint venture with the Softbank Group to expand our vCloud Air service to Japan. We are currently making significant investments in developing and introducing new technologies and product offerings related to our SDDC, vCloud Air and end-user and mobile computing initiatives.

The expansion of our offerings to deliver the SDDC, address IT management and automation, add network and storage virtualization, and enhance our end-user computing capabilities and our hybrid cloud offerings subjects us to additional risks, such as the following:

As our vSphere-related products continue to mature, our future revenue growth is increasingly dependent on revenue from our new product and technology offerings. Our newer initiatives may be less profitable than our established products, and we may not be successful enough in these newer activities to recoup our investments in them. If any of these risks were to occur, it could damage our reputation, limit our growth and negatively affect our operating results.

Our vCloud Air offering relies upon a number of third-party providers for data center space, equipment, maintenance and other colocation services, and the loss of, or problems with, one or more of these providers may impede the growth of our vCloud Air offerings, adversely impact our plans to expand the service and damage our reputation.

We launched our vCloud Air service offerings in 2013 in the United States and began to expand the services globally in 2014. Our vCloud Air offerings rely upon third-party providers to supply data center space, equipment maintenance and other colocation services. While we have entered into various agreements for the lease of data center space, equipment maintenance and other services, third parties could fail to live up to the contractual obligations under those agreements. For example, a data center landlord may fail to adequately maintain its facilities or provide an appropriate data center infrastructure for which it is

responsible. If that were to happen, our ability to deliver services at levels acceptable to our customers and at levels that we have committed to could be impaired. Additionally, if the third parties that we rely on do fail to deliver on their obligations, our reputation could be damaged, our customers could lose confidence in us, and our ability to maintain and expand our vCloud Air offerings would be impaired.

Ongoing uncertainty regarding global economic conditions and the stability of regional financial markets may reduce information technology spending below current expectations and therefore adversely impact our revenues, impede end-user adoption of new products and services and product and service upgrades, and adversely impact our competitive position.

Our business depends on the overall demand for information technology and on the economic health of our current and prospective customers. The purchase of our products and services is often discretionary and may involve a significant commitment of capital and other resources. Weak economic conditions or significant uncertainty regarding the stability of financial markets could adversely impact our business, financial condition and results of operations in a number of ways, including by lengthening sales cycles, affecting the size of enterprise license agreements ("ELAs") that customers will commit to, reducing the level of our non-ELA transactional sales, lowering prices for our products and services, reducing unit sales and reducing the rate of adoption of our products and services by new customers and the willingness of current customers to purchase upgrades to our existing products and services. For example, a recurrence of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe or that region's failure to recover from recession would threaten to suppress demand and our customers' access to credit in that region, which is an important market for our products and services. Additionally, in response to sustained economic uncertainty, many national and local governments that are current or prospective customers for our products and services, including the U.S. federal government, have made, or threatened to make, significant spending cutbacks which could reduce the amount of government spending on IT and the potential demand for our products and services from the government sector.

Regional economic uncertainty can also result in general and ongoing tightening in the credit markets, lower levels of liquidity, increases in the rates of default and bankruptcy and significant volatility in the credit, equity and fixed income markets. As a result, current or potential customers may be unable to fund software purchases, which could cause them to delay, decrease or cancel purchases of our products and services. Even if customers are willing to purchase our products and services, if they do not meet our credit requirements, we may not be able to record accounts receivable or unearned revenues or recognize revenues from these customers until we receive payment, which could adversely affect the amount of revenues we are able to recognize in a particular period.

In addition, although we plan to continue making strategic investments in our business, many of our competitors have significantly greater financial, technical and other resources than we do, and to the degree that the economic recovery is anemic or not sustained, they may be better positioned to continue investment in competitive technologies.

Our revenues, unearned revenues, collection of accounts receivable and financial results may be adversely impacted by fluctuation of foreign currency exchange rates. Although foreign currency hedges can offset some of the risk related to foreign currency fluctuations, we will continue to experience foreign currency gains and losses in certain instances where it is not possible or cost effective to hedge our foreign currency exposures.

Our revenues, unearned revenues, and our collection of accounts receivable may be adversely impacted as a result of fluctuations in the exchange rates between the U.S. dollar and foreign currencies. For example, we have distributors in foreign countries that may incur higher costs in periods when the value of the U.S. dollar strengthens against foreign currencies. One or more of these distributors could delay payments or default on credit extended to them as a result. Any significant delay or default in the collection of significant accounts receivable could result in an increased need for us to obtain working capital from other sources. If we determine that the amount of accounts receivable that is uncollectible is greater than our estimates, we would recognize an increase in bad debt expense, which would have a negative impact on our results of operations. In addition, in periods when the value of the U.S. dollar strengthens, we may need to offer additional discounts, reduce prices or offer other incentives to mitigate the negative effect on demand.

We invoice and collect in certain non-U.S. dollar denominated currencies, thereby conducting a portion of our transactions in currencies other than the U.S. dollar. Although this practice may alleviate credit risk from our distributors during periods when the U.S. dollar strengthens, it shifts the risk of currency fluctuations to us and may negatively impact our revenues, unearned revenues, anticipated cash flows and financial results due to fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates, particularly the euro, the British pound, the Japanese yen, the Australian dollar and the Chinese renminbi relative to the U.S. dollar. While variability in operating margin may be reduced due to invoicing in certain of the local currencies in which we also recognize expenses, increased exposure to foreign currency fluctuations will introduce additional risk for variability in revenue-related components of our consolidated financial statements. In 2014 approximately 30% of our sales were invoiced and collected in certain non-U.S. dollar denominated currencies.

We enter into foreign currency forward contracts to hedge a portion of our net outstanding monetary assets and liabilities against movements in certain foreign exchange rates. Although we expect the gains and losses on our foreign currency forward contracts to generally offset the majority of the gains and losses associated with the underlying foreign-currency denominated

assets and liabilities that we hedge, our hedging transactions may not yield the results we expect. Additionally, we expect to continue to experience foreign currency gains and losses in certain instances where it is not possible or cost effective to hedge our foreign currency exposures. For example, we experienced a measurable negative impact to our revenues in the fourth quarter of 2014 due to exchange rate fluctuations and we expect a further negative impact to 2015 revenues and unearned revenues even if currency exchange rates stabilize. The further weakening of foreign currency exchange rates against the U.S. dollar would likely result in additional adverse impact on our revenues.

We may not be able to respond to rapid technological changes with new solutions and services offerings, which could have a material adverse effect on our sales and profitability.

The virtualization, cloud computing, end-user computing and SDDC industries are characterized by rapid technological changes, changing customer needs, frequent new software product introductions and evolving industry standards. The introduction of third-party solutions embodying new technologies and the emergence of new industry standards could make our existing and future software solutions obsolete and unmarketable. Cloud computing is proving to be a disruptive technology that will alter the way that businesses consume, manage and provide physical IT resources, applications, data and IT services. We may not be able to establish or sustain our thought leadership in the cloud computing and enterprise software fields, and our customers may not view our products and services as innovative and best-of-breed, which could result in a reduction in market share and our inability to command a pricing premium over competitor products and services. We may not be able to develop updated products and services that keep pace with technological developments and emerging industry standards and that address the increasingly sophisticated needs of our customers or that interoperate with new or updated operating systems and hardware devices or certify our products and services to work with these systems and devices. As a result, we may not be able to accurately predict the lifecycle of our software solutions, and they may become obsolete before we receive the amount of revenues that we anticipate from them. There is no assurance that any of our new offerings would be accepted in the marketplace. Significant reductions in server-related costs or the rise of more efficient infrastructure management software could also affect demand for our software solutions. As hardware and processors become more powerful, we will have to adapt our product and service offerings to take advantage of the increased capabilities. For example, while the introduction of more powerful servers presents an opportunity for us to provide better products for our customers, the migration of servers to microprocessors with an increasing number of multiple cores also allows an end user with a given number of licensed copies of our software to multiply the number of virtualization machines run per server socket without having to purchase additional licenses from us. If we are unable to revise our solutions and offerings in response to new technological developments, our ability to retain or increase market share and revenues in the virtualization software space could be materially adversely affected.

Our operating results may fluctuate significantly, which makes our future results difficult to predict and may result in our operating results falling below expectations or our guidance and cause the price of our Class A common stock to decline.

Our operating results may fluctuate due to a variety of factors, many of which are outside of our control. As a result, comparing our operating results on a period-to-period basis may not be meaningful. Our past results should not be relied upon as an indication of our future performance. In addition, a significant portion of our quarterly sales typically occurs during the last month of the quarter, which generally reflects customer buying patterns for enterprise technology. As a result, our quarterly operating results are difficult to predict even in the near term. If our revenues or operating results fall below the expectations of investors or securities analysts or below any guidance we may provide to the market, the price of our Class A common stock would likely decline substantially.

In addition, factors that may affect our operating results include, among others:

The failure by customers to renew large license agreement transactions on a satisfactory basis could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition, operating results and cash flow.

Our core customers are large enterprises with multi-year enterprise license agreements, each of which involves substantial aggregate fee amounts. The failure to renew those transactions in the future, at a dollar value at least equal to the original agreement, or to replace those enterprise license agreements with new transactions of similar scope, on terms that are commercially attractive to us could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition, operating results and cash flow.

Our current research and development efforts may not produce significant revenues for several years, if at all.

Developing our products and services is expensive. Our investment in research and development may not result in marketable products or services or may result in products and services that take longer to generate revenues, or may generate less revenues, than we anticipate. Our research and development expenses were approximately 21% of our total revenues during both 2014 and 2013 . Our future plans include significant investments in software research and development and related product opportunities. We believe that we must continue to dedicate a significant amount of resources to our research and development efforts to maintain our competitive position. However, we may not receive significant revenues from these investments for several years, if at all.

Our products and services are sold using ELAs and through our transactional business, and this strategy may not drive long-term sales and revenue growth.

We sell our products and services through two primary means, which we refer to as our ELA and our non-ELA, or transactional, sales.

ELAs are comprehensive long-term license agreements that provide for multi-year maintenance and support and constitute an increasing percentage of total overall sales. We believe that ELAs help us grow our business by building long-term relationships with our enterprise customers.

In recent periods, 25% to 40% of our overall sales each quarter have been comprised of ELAs. These are generally larger size transactions, typically driven by our direct sales force and are primarily attractive to our larger enterprise customers.

Transactional sales, in contrast, tend to be smaller in scope, shorter in duration with a standard one-year maintenance term, and are principally driven by our sales channel partners. Historically, they have represented 60% to 75% of our overall sales.

Our year-over-year overall sales, ELA sales and our transactional sales all increased in 2014 compared to 2013. Although our transactional business has increased during 2014, as we develop and add new product and service capabilities to our higher-end product offerings, and as our ELA volume continues to grow, we may not be successful in our strategy to increase the value of the products and services sold through the transactional business. Consequently, we may not be able to increase sales

volumes in our transactional business or help attract new customers to our product ecosystem with our enhanced product features and capabilities.

If our overall go-to-market strategy is not successful, our growth rates may decline further, and our business, financial condition and results of operations could be materially adversely affected.

Our sales cycles can be long and unpredictable, our sales efforts require considerable time and expense, and timing of sales is subject to changing purchasing behaviors of our customers. As a result, our sales are difficult to predict and may vary substantially from quarter to quarter, which may cause our operating results to fluctuate significantly.

The timing of our revenues is difficult to predict. Our sales efforts involve educating our customers about the use and benefit of our products and services, including their technical capabilities, potential cost savings to an organization and advantages compared to lower-cost products and services offered by our competitors. Customers typically undertake a significant evaluation process that has in the past resulted in a lengthy sales cycle which typically lasts several months, and may last a year or longer. We spend substantial time, effort and money on our sales efforts without any assurance that our efforts will produce any sales. In addition, product and service purchases are frequently subject to budget constraints, economic conditions, multiple approvals, and unplanned administrative, processing and other delays. Moreover, the greater number of competitive alternatives, as well as announcements by our competitors that they intend to introduce competitive alternatives at some point in the future, can lengthen customer procurement cycles, cause us to spend additional time and resources to educate end users on the advantages of our product and service offerings and delay product and service sales. Economic downturns and uncertainty can also cause customers to add layers to their internal purchase approval processes, adding further time to a sales cycle. Additionally, as we sell more products and services to domestic and foreign governments, we may encounter lengthier sales cycles, complicated budgeting processes and complex procurement regulations. These factors can have a particular impact on the timing and length of our ELA sales cycles and our overall sales during any particular fiscal period may have greater variability as a greater portion of our sales is made utilizing ELAs.

Additionally, our quarterly sales have historically reflected an uneven pattern in which a disproportionate percentage of a quarter's total sales occur in the last month, weeks and days of each quarter. Similarly, our yearly sales have historically reflected a disproportionate percentage of the year's sales in the fourth fiscal quarter. These patterns make prediction of revenues, earnings and working capital for each financial period especially difficult and uncertain and increase the risk of unanticipated variations in financial condition and results of operations. We believe this uneven sales pattern is a result of many factors including the following:

If sales expected from specific customers for a particular quarter are not realized in that quarter or at all, our results could fall short of public expectations and our business, financial condition and results of operations could be materially adversely affected.

We are dependent on our management and our key development personnel, and the loss of key personnel may prevent us from implementing our business plan in a timely manner.

Our success depends largely upon the continued services of our existing management. We are also substantially dependent on the continued service of our key development personnel for product and service innovation and timely development and delivery of upgrades and enhancements to our existing products and services. The market for expert software developers upon whom we rely has become increasingly competitive. We generally do not have employment or non-compete agreements with our existing management or development personnel, and, therefore, they could terminate their employment with us at any time without penalty and could pursue employment opportunities with any of our competitors. Changes to management and key employees can also lead to additional unplanned losses of key employees. The loss of key employees could seriously harm our ability to release new products and services on a timely basis and could significantly help our competitors.

Because competition for our target employees is intense, we may not be able to attract and retain the highly skilled employees we need to support our planned growth, and our compensation expenses may increase.

To execute on our strategy, we must continue to attract and retain highly qualified personnel. Competition for these personnel is intense, especially for senior sales executives and engineers with high levels of experience in designing and developing software. We may not be successful in attracting and retaining qualified personnel. We have from time to time in the past experienced, and we expect to continue to experience in the future, difficulty in hiring and retaining highly skilled employees with appropriate qualifications. Many of the companies with which we compete for experienced personnel have

greater resources than we have. Research and development personnel are also aggressively recruited by startup and emerging growth companies, which are especially active in many of the technical areas and geographic regions in which we conduct product and service development. In addition, in making employment decisions, particularly in the high-technology industry, job candidates often consider the value of the stock-based compensation they are to receive in connection with their employment. Declines in the value of our stock could adversely affect our ability to attract or retain key employees and result in increased employee compensation expenses. If we fail to attract new personnel or fail to retain and motivate our current personnel, our business and future growth prospects could be severely harmed.

Our success depends upon our ability to develop new products and services, integrate acquired products and services, enhance our existing products and services and develop appropriate business and pricing models.

If we are unable to develop new products and services, integrate acquired products and services, enhance and improve our products and support services in a timely manner, or position or price our products and services to meet market demand, customers may not buy new software licenses from us, update to new versions of our software or renew product support. In addition, information technology standards from both consortia and formal standards-setting forums as well as de facto marketplace standards are rapidly evolving. We cannot provide any assurance that the standards on which we choose to develop new products and services will allow us to compete effectively for business opportunities in emerging areas such as cloud computing.

New product and service development and introduction involve a significant commitment of time and resources and is subject to a number of risks and challenges including:

In addition, if we cannot adapt our business models to keep pace with industry trends, our revenues could be negatively impacted. For example, if we increase our adoption of subscription-based pricing models for our products, we may fail to set pricing at levels appropriate to maintain our revenue streams or our customers may choose to deploy products from our competitors that they believe are priced more favorably. Additionally, we may fail to accurately predict subscription renewal rates or their impact on results of operations, and because revenues from subscriptions is recognized for our services over the term of the subscription, downturns or upturns in sales may not be immediately reflected in our results. As we offer more products that depend on converting users of free services to users of premium services and as such services grow in size, our ability to maintain or improve and to predict conversion rates will become more important.

Breaches of our cybersecurity systems could degrade our ability to conduct our business operations and deliver products and services to our customers, delay our ability to recognize revenue, compromise the integrity of our software products, result in significant data losses and the theft of our intellectual property, damage our reputation, expose us to liability to third parties, and require us to incur significant additional costs to maintain the security of our networks and data.

We increasingly depend upon our IT systems to conduct virtually all of our business operations, ranging from our internal operations and product development activities to our marketing and sales efforts and communications with our customers and business partners. Unauthorized parties have attempted to penetrate our network security and our website. Such cyberattacks

threaten to misappropriate our proprietary information and cause interruptions of our IT services. Because the techniques used by unauthorized persons to access or sabotage networks change frequently and may not be recognized until launched against a target, we may be unable to anticipate these techniques. Further, if unauthorized access or sabotage remains undetected for an extended period of time, the effects of such breach could be exacerbated. In addition, sophisticated hardware and operating system software and applications that we produce or procure from third parties may contain defects in design or manufacture, including "bugs" and other problems that could unexpectedly interfere with the operation of the system. Our exposure to cybersecurity threats and negative consequences of cybersecurity breaches will likely increase as our vCloud Air business expands and we store increasing amounts of customer data and host or manage parts of customers' businesses in cloud-based IT environments.

We have also outsourced a number of our business functions to third party contractors, and our business operations also depend, in part, on the success of our contractors' own cybersecurity measures. We also use third parties to provide colocation services (i.e. data center services) for our hybrid cloud offering. Similarly, we rely upon distributors, resellers, system vendors and systems integrators to sell our products and our sales operations depend, in part, on the reliability of their cybersecurity measures. Additionally, we depend upon our employees to appropriately handle confidential data and deploy our IT resources in safe and secure fashion that does not expose our network systems to security breaches and the loss of data. Accordingly, if our cybersecurity systems and those of our contractors, partners and vendors fail to protect against unauthorized access, sophisticated cyberattacks and the mishandling of data by our employees, contractors, partners or vendors, our ability to conduct our business effectively could be damaged in a number of ways, including:

Should any of the above events occur, we could be subject to significant claims for liability from our customers, regulatory actions from governmental agencies, our ability to protect our intellectual property rights could be compromised and our reputation and competitive position could be significantly harmed. Also, the regulatory and contractual actions, litigations, investigations, fines, penalties and liabilities relating to data breaches that result in losses of personally identifiable or credit card information of users of our services can be significant in terms of fines and reputational impact, and necessitate changes to our business operations that may be disruptive to us. Additionally, we could incur significant costs in order to upgrade our cybersecurity systems and remediate damages. Consequently, our financial performance and results of operations could be adversely affected.

Our products and services are highly technical and may contain errors, defects or security vulnerabilities which could cause harm to our reputation and adversely affect our business.

Our products and services are highly technical and complex and, when deployed, have contained and may contain errors, defects or security vulnerabilities. Some errors in our products or services may only be discovered after a product or service has been installed and used by customers. Any errors, defects or security vulnerabilities discovered in our products or services after commercial release could result in loss of revenues or delay in revenue recognition, loss of customers and increased service and warranty cost, any of which could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. Undiscovered vulnerabilities in our products or services could expose them to hackers or other unscrupulous third parties who develop and deploy viruses, worms, and other malicious software programs that could attack our products or services. In the past, VMware has been made aware of public postings by hackers of portions of our source code. It is possible that the released source code could expose unknown security vulnerabilities in our products and services that could be exploited by hackers or others. We may also inherit unknown security vulnerabilities when we integrate the products or services of companies that we acquire into existing and new VMware products or services.

Actual or perceived security vulnerabilities in our products or services could harm our reputation and lead some customers to return products or services, to reduce or delay future purchases or to use competitive products or services. End users, who rely on our products and services for the interoperability of enterprise servers and applications that are critical to their information systems, may have a greater sensitivity to product errors and security vulnerabilities than customers for software products generally. Any security breaches could lead to interruptions, delays and data loss and protection concerns. By their nature, security breaches are often difficult to detect and the failure to detect a breach for an extended period of time could

significantly increase the damage it could cause. In addition, we could face claims for product liability, tort or breach of warranty, including claims relating to changes to our products and services made by our channel partners. Our contracts with customers contain provisions relating to warranty disclaimers and liability limitations, which may not be upheld, and customers and channel partners may seek indemnification from us for their losses and those of their customers. Defending a lawsuit, regardless of its merit, is costly and time-consuming and may divert management's attention and adversely affect the market's perception of us and our products and services. In addition, if our business liability insurance coverage proves inadequate or future coverage is unavailable on acceptable terms or at all, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely impacted.

Operating in foreign countries subjects us to additional risks that may harm our ability to increase or maintain our international sales operations and investments.

Revenues from customers outside the United States comprised approximately 52% of our total revenues in the years ended 2014 and 2013 . We have sales, administrative, research and development and technical support personnel in numerous countries worldwide. We expect to continue to add personnel in additional countries. Additionally, our investment portfolio includes investments in non-U.S. financial instruments and holdings in non-U.S. financial institutions, including European institutions. Our international operations subject us to a variety of risks, including:

Additionally, as we continue to expand our business globally, we will need to maintain compliance with legal and regulatory requirements covering the foreign activities of U.S. corporations, such as export control requirements and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, as well as with local regulatory requirements in non-U.S. jurisdictions. These risks will increase as we expand our operations to locations with a higher incidence of corruption and fraudulent business practices. Our success will depend, in large part, on our ability to anticipate and effectively manage these and other risks associated with our international operations. We expect a significant portion of our growth to occur in foreign countries, which can add to the difficulties in maintaining adequate management and compliance systems and internal controls over financial reporting, and increase challenges in managing an organization operating in various countries. In addition, potential fallout from recent disclosures related to the U.S. Internet and communications surveillance could also make foreign customers reluctant to purchase cloud computing products and services from U.S.-based companies and impair our growth rate in foreign markets.

Our failure to manage any of these risks successfully could negatively affect our reputation, limit our growth, harm our operations and reduce our international sales.

Failure to effectively manage our product and service lifecycles could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition, operating results and cash flow.

As part of the natural lifecycle of our products and services, we periodically inform customers that products or services will be reaching their end of life or end of availability and will no longer be supported or receive updates and security patches. To the extent these products or services remain subject to a service contract with the customer, we offer to transition the customer to alternative products or services. Failure to effectively manage our product and service lifecycles could lead to

customer dissatisfaction, and contractual liabilities, which could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition, operating results and cash flow.

If operating system and hardware vendors do not cooperate with us or we are unable to obtain early access to their new products, or access to certain information about their new products to ensure that our solutions interoperate with those products, our product development efforts may be delayed or foreclosed.

Our products interoperate with Windows, Linux and other operating systems and the hardware devices of numerous manufacturers. Developing products that interoperate properly requires substantial partnering, capital investment and employee resources, as well as the cooperation of the vendors and developers of the operating systems and hardware. Operating system and hardware vendors may not provide us with early access to their technology and products, assist us in these development efforts or share with or sell to us any application programming interfaces, or APIs, formats or protocols we may need. If they do not provide us with the necessary early access, assistance or proprietary technology on a timely basis, we may experience product development delays or be unable to expand our products into other areas. To the extent that software or hardware vendors develop products that compete with ours or those of our controlling stockholder, EMC Corporation ("EMC"), they may have an incentive to withhold their cooperation, decline to share access or sell to us their proprietary APIs, protocols or formats, or engage in practices to actively limit the functionality, compatibility and certification of our products. To the extent that we enter into collaborations or joint development and marketing arrangements with certain hardware and software vendors, vendors who compete with our collaborative partners may similarly choose to limit their cooperation with us. In addition, hardware or operating system vendors may fail to certify or support or continue to certify or support our products for their systems. If any of the foregoing occurs, our product development efforts may be delayed or foreclosed and our business and results of operations may be adversely affected.

We rely on distributors, resellers, system vendors and systems integrators to sell our products and services, and our failure to effectively develop, manage or prevent disruptions to our distribution channels and the processes and procedures that support them could cause a reduction in the number of end users of our products and services.

Our future success is highly dependent upon maintaining and increasing the number of our relationships with distributors, resellers, system vendors and systems integrators. Because we rely on distributors, resellers, system vendors and systems integrators, we may have little or no contact with the ultimate users of our products and services, thereby making it more difficult for us to establish brand awareness, ensure proper delivery and installation of our products and services, service ongoing customer requirements, estimate end-user demand and respond to evolving customer needs.

Recruiting and retaining qualified channel partners and training them in the use of our technology and product offerings requires significant time and resources. In order to develop and expand our distribution channel, we must continue to expand and improve our processes and procedures that support our channel, including our investment in systems and training, and those processes and procedures may become increasingly complex and difficult to manage. The time and expense required for sales and marketing organizations of our channel partners to become familiar with our product and service offerings, including our new product and service developments, may make it more difficult to introduce those products and services to end users and delay end-user adoption of our product and service offerings.

We generally do not have long-term contracts or minimum purchase commitments with our distributors, resellers, system vendors and systems integrators, and our contracts with these channel partners do not prohibit them from offering products or services that compete with ours. Our competitors may be effective in providing incentives to existing and potential channel partners to favor products and services of our competitors or to prevent or reduce sales of our products and services. Certain system vendors now offer competing virtualization products pre-installed on their server products and services. Additionally, our competitors could attempt to require key distributors to enter into exclusivity arrangements with them or otherwise apply their pricing or marketing leverage to discourage distributors from offering our products and services. Accordingly, our channel partners may choose not to offer our products and services exclusively or at all. Our failure to maintain and increase the number of relationships with channel partners would likely lead to a loss of end users of our products and services, which would result in us receiving lower revenues from our channel partners.

Three of our distributors each accounted for 10% or more of our consolidated revenues during the year ended of 2014 . Our agreements with distributors are typically terminable by either party upon 30 to 90 days' prior written notice to the other party, and neither party has any obligation to purchase or sell any products or services under the agreements. While we believe that we have in place, or would have in place by the date of any such termination, agreements with replacement distributors sufficient to maintain our revenues from distribution, if we were to lose the distribution services of a significant distributor, such loss could have a negative impact on our results of operations until such time as we arrange to replace these distribution services with the services of existing or new distributors.

The concentration of our product sales among a limited number of distributors increases our potential credit risk. Additionally, weakness in credit markets could affect the ability of our distributors, resellers and customers to comply with the terms of credit we provide in the ordinary course of business. Accordingly, if our distributors, resellers and customers find it difficult to obtain credit or comply with the terms of their credit obligations, it could cause significant fluctuations or declines in our product revenues.

Three of our distributors each accounted for 10% or more of our consolidated revenues during the year ended of 2014 . We anticipate that sales of our products to a limited number of distributors will continue to account for a significant portion of our total product revenues for the foreseeable future. The concentration of product sales among certain distributors increases our potential credit risks. For example, approximately 42% of our total accounts receivable as of December 31, 2014 was from these three distributors. Some of our distributors may experience financial difficulties, which could adversely impact our collection of accounts receivable. One or more of these distributors could delay payments or default on credit extended to them. Our exposure to credit risks of our distributors may increase if our distributors and their customers are adversely affected by global or regional economic conditions. Additionally, we provide credit to distributors, resellers, and certain end-user customers in the normal course of business. Credit is generally extended to new customers based upon a credit evaluation. Credit is extended to existing customers based on ongoing credit evaluations, prior payment history, and demonstrated financial stability. We often allow distributors and customers to purchase and receive shipments of products in excess of their established credit limit. We are unable to recognize revenues from such shipments until the collection of those amounts becomes reasonably assured. Any significant delay or default in the collection of significant accounts receivable could result in an increased need for us to obtain working capital from other sources, possibly on worse terms than we could have negotiated if we had established such working capital resources prior to such delays or defaults. Any significant default could result in a negative impact on our results of operations and delay our ability to recognize revenue.

We may become involved in litigation and regulatory inquiries and proceedings that could negatively affect us.

From time to time, we are involved in various legal, administrative and regulatory proceedings, claims, demands and investigations relating to our business, which may include claims with respect to commercial, product liability, intellectual property, employment, class action, whistleblower and other matters. In the ordinary course of business, VMware also receives inquiries from and has discussions with government entities regarding the compliance of its contracting and sales practices with laws and regulations. Such matters can be time-consuming, divert management's attention and resources and cause us to incur significant expenses. While no formal legal proceedings that we expect to have a material impact on our financial condition or results of operations have been commenced, there can be no assurance that actions will not be taken in the future, and final resolution of such claims could be materially different from our current estimates. Furthermore, because litigation and the outcome of regulatory proceedings are inherently unpredictable, it is possible that our business, financial condition or results of operations could be negatively affected by an unfavorable resolution of one or more of such proceedings, claims, demands or investigations.

Our business is subject to a variety of U.S. and international laws and regulations regarding data protection.

Our business is subject to federal, state and international laws and regulations regarding privacy and protection of personal data. As Internet commerce continues to evolve, regulation by federal, state and foreign governments or agencies in the areas of data privacy and data security is likely to increase. Other nations have data privacy laws that, in some respects, are more stringent than privacy standards in the United States. As we expand our operations in these countries, our liability exposure and the complexity and cost of compliance with data and privacy requirements will likely increase. We collect contact and other personal or identifying information from our customers. Additionally, in connection with some of our product initiatives, including our web-based services, mobile services and our vCloud Air offering, we expect that our customers may increasingly use our services to store and process personal information and other regulated data. We post, on our websites, and, where appropriate, within our products, our privacy policies and practices concerning our treatment of personal data. We also often include privacy commitments in our contracts. Any failure by us to comply with our posted privacy policies, other federal, state or international privacy-related or data protection laws and regulations, or the privacy commitments contained in our contracts could result in proceedings against us by governmental entities or others, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations. In addition, the increased attention focused upon liability issues as a result of lawsuits and legislative proposals could harm our reputation or otherwise impact the growth of our business.

It is possible that these laws and regulations may be interpreted and applied in a manner that is inconsistent with our data practices. If so, in addition to the possibility of fines and penalties, a governmental order requiring that we change our data practices could result, which in turn could have a material adverse effect on our business. Compliance with such an order may involve significant costs or require changes in business practices that result in reduced revenues. Noncompliance could result in penalties being imposed on us or we could be ordered to cease conducting the noncompliant activity.

In addition to government regulation, privacy advocacy and industry groups or other third parties may propose new and different self-regulatory standards that either legally or contractually apply to our customers or us. Any inability to adequately

address privacy concerns, even if unfounded, or comply with applicable privacy or data protection laws, regulations and standards, could result in additional cost and liability to us, damage our reputation, reduce sales and harm our business.

Additionally, our virtualization technology is used by cloud computing vendors, and we have expanded our involvement in the delivery and provision of cloud computing through business alliances with various providers of cloud computing services and software and expect to continue to do so in the future. The application of U.S. and international data privacy laws to cloud computing vendors is uncertain, and our existing contractual provisions may prove to be inadequate to protect us from claims for data loss or regulatory noncompliance made against cloud computing providers who we may partner with. Accordingly, the failure to comply with data protection laws and regulations by our customers and business partners who provide cloud computing services could have a material adverse effect on our business.

Since some of our products and services are web-based, our customers store their data on our servers and our vendors' servers. This data may include personal data. It may also include protected health information ("PHI") that may be subject to federal, state and international health care privacy, data privacy or security laws, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ("HIPAA"). HIPAA has been amended by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act ("HITECH Act") with the result of increased civil penalties. As a result of HIPAA and the HITECH Act, business associates who have access to PHI provided by covered entities and other business associates are now directly subject to HIPAA. When our customers place PHI into our web-based services, including vCloud Air or our services hosted on our vCloud Air, we may be required to comply with HIPAA's data security requirements and may be liable for sanctions and penalties for failure to do so. Any systems failure or compromise of our security that results in the release of our customers' data could (i) subject us to substantial damage claims from our customers, (ii) expose us to costly regulatory remediation, and (iii) harm our reputation and brand. We may also need to expend significant resources to protect against security breaches.

If we fail to comply with our customer contracts or government contracting regulations, our business could be adversely affected.

Our contracts with our customers may include unique and specialized performance requirements. In particular, our contracts with federal, state, local and non-U.S. governmental customers and our arrangements with distributors and resellers who may sell directly to governmental customers are subject to various procurement regulations, contract provisions and other requirements relating to their formation, administration and performance. Any failure by us to comply with provisions in our customer contracts or any violation of government contracting regulations could result in the imposition of various civil and criminal penalties, which may include termination of contracts, forfeiture of profits, suspension of payments and, in the case of our government contracts, fines and suspension from future government contracting. Further, any negative publicity related to our customer contracts or any proceedings surrounding them, regardless of its accuracy, may damage our business and affect our ability to compete for new contracts. In the ordinary course of business, we also receive inquiries from and have ongoing discussions with government entities regarding the compliance of our contracting and sales practices with laws and regulations. We continue to cooperate with the U.S. General Services Administration and the Department of Justice in their inquiries regarding our government sales practices between 2006 and 2013. During the second quarter of 2014 , we recognized a liability of approximately $11 million in connection with this matter as the loss was determined to be both probable and reasonably estimable. While no formal legal proceedings have been commenced, final resolution of the matter could result in liability materially different from the accrued amount, and there can be no assurance that actions will not be commenced in the future. If our customer contracts are terminated, if we are suspended from government work or fines or other government sanctions are imposed, or if our ability to compete for new contracts is adversely affected, our business, operating results or financial condition could be adversely affected.

If we are unable to protect our intellectual property rights, our competitive position could be harmed or we could be required to incur significant expenses to enforce our rights.

We depend on our ability to protect our proprietary technology. We rely on trade secret, patent, copyright and trademark laws and confidentiality agreements with employees and third parties, all of which offer only limited protection. As such, despite our efforts, the steps we have taken to protect our proprietary rights may not be adequate to preclude misappropriation of our proprietary information or infringement of our intellectual property rights, and our ability to police such misappropriation or infringement is uncertain, particularly in countries outside of the United States. Further, with respect to patent rights, we do not know whether any of our pending patent applications will result in the issuance of patents or whether the examination process will require us to narrow our claims. To the extent that additional patents are issued from our patent applications, which are not certain, they may be contested, circumvented or invalidated in the future. Moreover, the rights granted under any issued patents may not provide us with proprietary protection or competitive advantages, and, as with any technology, competitors may be able to develop similar or superior technologies to our own now or in the future. In addition, we rely on confidentiality or license agreements with third parties in connection with their use of our products and technology. There is no guarantee that such parties will abide by the terms of such agreements or that we will be able to adequately enforce our rights, in part because we rely on "click-wrap" and "shrink-wrap" licenses in some instances.

Detecting and protecting against the unauthorized use of our products, technology proprietary rights, and intellectual property rights is expensive, difficult and, in some cases, impossible. Litigation may be necessary in the future to enforce or defend our intellectual property rights, to protect our trade secrets or to determine the validity and scope of the proprietary rights of others. Such litigation could result in substantial costs and diversion of management resources, either of which could harm our business, financial condition and results of operations, and there is no guarantee that we would be successful. Furthermore, many of our current and potential competitors have the ability to dedicate substantially greater resources to protecting their technology or intellectual property rights than we do. Accordingly, despite our efforts, we may not be able to prevent third parties from infringing upon or misappropriating our intellectual property, which could result in a substantial loss of our market share.

We provide access to our hypervisor and other selected source code to partners, which creates additional risk that our competitors could develop products that are similar to or better than ours.

Our success and ability to compete depend substantially upon our internally developed technology, which in some cases is incorporated in the source code for our products. We seek to protect the source code, design code, documentation and other information relating to our software, under trade secret, copyright, and other applicable laws. However, we have chosen to provide access to our hypervisor and other selected source code to several dozen of our partners for co-development, as well as for open APIs, formats and protocols. Though we generally control access to our source code and other intellectual property, and enter into confidentiality or license agreements with such partners, as well as with our employees and consultants, this combination of procedural and contractual safeguards may be insufficient to protect our trade secrets and other rights to our technology. Our protective measures may be inadequate, especially because we may not be able to prevent our partners, employees or consultants from violating any agreements or licenses we may have in place or abusing their access granted to our source code. Improper disclosure or use of our source code could help competitors develop products similar to or better than ours.

We are, and may in the future be, subject to claims by others that we infringe or contribute to the infringement of their proprietary technology, which could force us to pay damages or prevent us from using certain technology in our products.

Companies in the software and technology industries own large numbers of patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets and frequently enter into litigation based on allegations of infringement or other violations of intellectual property rights. This risk may increase as the number of products and competitors in our market increases as computing, networking, storage, and software technologies increasingly converge. This risk may also increase as a result of our increasing presence in the mobile enterprise management space. The threat of intellectual property infringement claims against us may increase in the future because of constant technological change in the segments in which we compete, extensive patent coverage of existing technologies and the rapid rate of issuance of new patents. Additionally, there is an increased risk that our competitors will use their intellectual property rights to limit our freedom to operate and exploit our products or to otherwise block us from taking full advantage of our markets.

In addition, as a well-known information technology company, we risk being the subject of an increasing number of intellectual property infringement claims, including claims by entities that do not have operating businesses of their own and therefore limit our ability to seek counterclaims for damages and injunctive relief. Any claim of infringement by a third party, even one without merit, could cause us to incur substantial costs defending against the claim, and could distract our management from our business. Furthermore, a party making such a claim, if successful, could secure a judgment that requires us to pay substantial damages. A judgment could also include an injunction or other court order that could prevent us from offering our products. In addition, we might be required to seek a license for the use of such intellectual property, which may not be available on commercially reasonable terms or at all. Alternatively, we may be required to develop non-infringing technology, which could require significant effort and expense and may ultimately not be successful. Any of these events could seriously harm our business, operating results and financial condition. Third parties may also assert infringement claims against our customers and channel partners. Any of these claims could require us to initiate or defend potentially protracted and costly litigation on their behalf, regardless of the merits of these claims, because we generally indemnify our customers and channel partners from claims of infringement of proprietary rights of third parties in connection with the use of our products. If any of these claims succeed, we may be forced to pay damages on behalf of our customers or channel partners, which could negatively affect our results of operations.

Our use of "open source" software in our products could negatively affect our ability to sell our products and subject us to possible litigation.

A significant portion of the products, technologies or services acquired, licensed, developed or offered by us may incorporate so-called "open source" software, and we may incorporate open source software into other products in the future. Such open source software is generally licensed by its authors or other third parties under open source licenses, including, for example, the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser General Public License, "Apache-style" licenses, "BSD-style" licenses and other open source licenses. We monitor our use of open source software in an effort to avoid subjecting our

products to conditions we do not intend. Although we believe that we have complied with our obligations under the various applicable licenses for open source software that we use, our processes used to monitor how open source software is used could be subject to error. In addition, there is little or no legal precedent governing the interpretation of terms in most of these licenses. Therefore, any improper usage of open source could result in unanticipated obligations regarding our products and technologies. For example, we may be subjected to certain conditions, including requirements that we offer our products that use the open source software for no cost, that we make available source code for modifications or derivative works we create based upon incorporating, using or distributing the open source software, that we license such modifications or derivative works under the terms of the particular open source license, that we revise or modify our product code to remove alleged infringing code or that we take other steps to avoid or remedy an alleged infringement. Any of these obligations could have an adverse impact on our intellectual property rights and our ability to derive revenues from products incorporating the open source software.

If an author or other third party that distributes such open source software were to allege that we had not complied with the conditions of one or more of these licenses, we could be required to incur significant legal expenses defending against such allegations. Although we have received inquiries regarding open source license compliance for software used in our products, no formal legal proceedings that would have a material impact on our results of operations or financial condition have been filed. However, there can be no assurance that actions will not be taken in the future. If our defenses were not successful, we could be subject to significant damages. We could also be enjoined from the distribution of our products that contained the open source software or be required to modify our products in order to comply with the conditions of the open source license(s) in question, thereby disrupting the distribution and sale of some of our products. In addition, if we combine our proprietary software with open source software in a certain manner, under some open source licenses we could be required to release the source code of our proprietary software, which could substantially help our competitors develop products that are similar to or better than ours.

In addition to risks related to license requirements, usage of open source software exposes us to risks that differ from the use of third-party commercial software because open source licensors generally do not provide warranties or assurance of title or controls on origin of the software. In addition, many of the risks associated with usage of open source software such as the lack of warranties or assurances of title cannot be eliminated and could, if not properly addressed, negatively affect our business. We have established processes to help address these risks, including a review process for screening requests from our development organizations for the use of open source and conducting appropriate due diligence of the use of open source software in the products developed by companies we acquire, but we cannot ensure that our processes will be sufficient, all open source software will be submitted for approval prior to use in our products, or all open source software is discovered during due diligence.

We offer a number of products under open source licenses that subject us to additional risks and challenges, which could result in increased development expenses, delays or disruptions to the release or distribution of those software solutions, and increased competition.

Several of our product offerings are distributed under open source licenses. Software solutions that are substantially or mostly based on open source software subject us to a number of risks and challenges:

If we are unable to successfully address the challenges of integrating offerings based upon open source technology into our business, our ability to realize revenues from such offerings will be negatively affected and our development costs may increase.

Acquisitions could disrupt our business, cause dilution to our stockholders and harm our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We have acquired in the past and plan to acquire in the future other businesses, products or technologies. Acquisitions can involve significant risks and uncertainties, which include:

Additionally, we may not be able to find suitable acquisition candidates, and we may not be able to complete acquisitions on favorable terms, if at all. If we do complete acquisitions, we may not ultimately strengthen our competitive position or achieve our goals, or they may be viewed negatively by customers, financial markets or investors. If our acquisitions do not meet our expectations, or if our strategic focus subsequently changes, we may choose to abandon certain acquired product lines and divest from acquired businesses. For example, in 2013, we divested certain business activities, including SlideRocket, Shavlik, and Zimbra. It is generally difficult for an acquirer to completely recover the cost of an acquisition which is subsequently divested. Accordingly, divestitures of acquired businesses and products may result in us taking charges for impairment of assets and goodwill, and result in cash expenditures in connection with headcount reductions.

The risks described above may be exacerbated as a result of managing multiple acquisitions at the same time. We may also face difficulties due to the lack of experience in new markets, products or technologies or the initial dependence on unfamiliar supply or distribution partners.

In addition to business acquisitions, we also seek to invest in businesses such as venture financed companies and joint ventures that offer complementary products, services or technologies. These investments are accompanied by risks similar to those encountered in an acquisition of a business. Additionally, we do not control entities where we have a minority investment, and therefore cannot ensure that these investments and joint ventures will make decisions that promote or are complementary to our business strategy.

If our goodwill or amortizable intangible assets become impaired, we may be required to record a significant charge to earnings.

We may not realize all the economic benefit from our acquisitions of other companies, which could result in an impairment of goodwill or intangibles. During 2014, our goodwill balance increased by $938 million or 31% primarily as a result of acquisitions made during the year. We review our amortizable intangible assets for impairment when events or changes in circumstances indicate the carrying value may not be recoverable. We test goodwill for impairment at least annually. Factors that may be considered a change in circumstances, indicating that the carrying value of our goodwill or amortizable intangible assets may not be recoverable, include a decline in stock price and market capitalization or cash flows, reduced future cash flow estimates, and slower growth rates in our industry. We may be required to record a significant charge in our financial statements during the period in which any impairment of our goodwill or amortizable intangible assets is determined, negatively impacting our results of operations.

If we fail to maintain an effective system of internal controls, we may not be able to accurately report our financial results or prevent fraud. As a result, our stockholders could lose confidence in our financial reporting, which could harm our business and the trading price of our Class A common stock.

In order to comply with the requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, we need to maintain our processes and systems and adapt them to changes in our business requirements and regulation. We may seek to automate certain processes to improve efficiencies and better ensure ongoing compliance but such automation may itself disrupt existing internal controls and introduce unintended vulnerability to error or fraud. This continuous process of maintaining and adapting our internal controls and compliance with Section 404 is expensive and time-consuming, and requires significant management attention. We cannot be certain that our internal control measures will continue to provide adequate control over our financial processes and reporting and ensure compliance with Section 404. Furthermore, as our business grows and changes and as we expand through acquisitions of other companies, our internal controls may become more complex and we will require significantly more resources to ensure our internal controls overall remain effective. Failure to implement required new or improved controls, or difficulties encountered in their implementation, could harm our operating results or cause us to fail to meet our reporting obligations. If we or our independent registered public accounting firm identify material weaknesses, the disclosure of that fact, even if quickly remedied, could reduce the market's confidence in our financial statements and harm our stock price. In addition, if we are unable to continue to comply with Section 404, our non-compliance could subject us to a variety of administrative sanctions, including the suspension or delisting of our Class A common stock from the New York Stock Exchange and the inability of registered broker-dealers to make a market in our Class A common stock, which could reduce our stock price.

Problems with our information systems could interfere with our business and could adversely impact our operations.

We rely on our information systems and those of third parties for processing customer orders, delivery of products, providing services and support to our customers, billing and tracking our customers, fulfilling contractual obligations and otherwise running our business. If our systems fail, our disaster recovery planning and capacity may prove insufficient to enable timely recovery of important functions and business records. Any disruption in our information systems and those of the third parties upon whom we rely could have a significant impact on our business. In addition, we continuously work to enhance our information systems. The implementation of these types of enhancements is frequently disruptive to the underlying business of an enterprise, which may especially be the case for us due to the size and complexity of our business. Additionally, our information systems may not support new business models and initiatives and significant investments could be required in order to upgrade them. Any disruptions relating to our systems enhancements, particularly any disruptions impacting our operations during the implementation period, could adversely affect our business in a number of respects. Additionally, delays in adapting our information systems to address new business models could limit the success or result in the failure of such initiatives and impair the effectiveness of our internal controls. Even if we do not encounter these adverse effects, the implementation of these enhancements may be much more costly than we anticipated. If we are unable to successfully implement the information systems enhancements as planned, our financial condition, results of operations and cash flows could be negatively impacted.

Our financial results may be adversely impacted by higher than expected tax rates, and we may have exposure to additional tax liabilities.

As a multinational corporation, we are subject to income taxes as well as non-income based taxes, such as payroll, sales, use, value-added, net worth, property and goods and services taxes, in both the United States and various foreign jurisdictions. Our domestic and international tax liabilities are subject to the allocation of revenues and expenses in different jurisdictions and the timing of recognizing revenues and expenses. Additionally, the amount of income taxes paid is subject to our interpretation of applicable tax laws in the jurisdictions in which we file and changes to tax laws. Significant judgment is required in determining our worldwide provision for income taxes and other tax liabilities. From time to time, we are subject to income and non-income tax examinations. Currently, the EMC consolidated tax group is under federal income tax audit for 2009 and

2010 and the audit is not expected to be completed until 2015. While we believe we have complied with all applicable income tax laws, there can be no assurance that a governing tax authority will not have a different interpretation of the law and assess us with additional taxes. Should we be assessed with additional taxes, there could be a material adverse effect on our financial condition or results of operations.

Our future effective tax rate may be affected by such factors as changes in tax laws, our business, rates, changing interpretation of existing laws or regulations, the impact of accounting for stock-based compensation, the impact of accounting for business combinations, and shifts in the amount of earnings in the U.S. compared with other regions in the world as well as the expiration of statute of limitations and settlements of audits, changes in our international organization, and changes in overall levels of income before tax. For example, the U.S. federal research credit, which provided a significant reduction in our effective tax rate, expired on December 31, 2014. Without the reinstatement of the U.S. federal research credit, we expect our 2015 effective tax rate to be higher than the 2014 effective tax rate.

In addition, in the ordinary course of our global business, there are many intercompany transactions and calculations where the ultimate tax determination is uncertain. Although we believe that our tax estimates are reasonable, we cannot ensure that the final determination of tax audits or tax disputes will not be different from what is reflected in our historical income tax provisions and accruals.

Additionally, our rate of taxation in foreign jurisdictions is lower than the U.S. tax rate. Our international income is primarily earned by our subsidiaries organized in Ireland and as such, our effective tax rate can be impacted by the mix of our earnings in the U.S. and foreign jurisdictions.

During October 2014, Ireland announced revisions to its tax regulations that will require foreign earnings earned by our subsidiaries organized in Ireland to be taxed at higher rates. We will be impacted by the changes in tax regulations in Ireland beginning in 2021. Additionally, the U.S. and other countries where we do business have been considering changes to existing tax laws. These potential changes could also adversely affect our effective tax rate.

Our business is subject to the risks of earthquakes, fire, floods and other natural catastrophic events such as pandemics, and to interruption by man-made problems, such as computer viruses, unanticipated disruptions in local infrastructure or terrorism, which could result in delays or cancellations of customer orders or the deployment of our products and services.

Our corporate headquarters are located in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region known for seismic activity. A significant natural disaster, such as an earthquake, fire, flood or other act of God, could have a material adverse impact on our business, financial condition and results of operations. As we continue to grow internationally, increasing amounts of our business will be located in foreign countries that may be more subject to political or social instability that could disrupt operations. Furthermore, some of our new product initiatives and business functions are hosted and carried out by third parties that may be vulnerable to disruptions of these sorts, many of which may be beyond our control. In addition, our servers are vulnerable to computer viruses, break-ins and similar disruptions from unauthorized tampering with our computer systems. Unanticipated disruptions in services provided through localized physical infrastructure, such as utility or telecommunication outages, can curtail the functioning of local offices as well as critical components of our information systems, and adversely affect our ability to process orders, provide services, respond to customer requests and maintain local and global business continuity. Natural disasters that affect the manufacture of IT products can also delay customer spending on our software, which is often coupled with customer purchases of new servers and IT systems. Furthermore, acts of terrorism or war could cause disruptions in our or our customers' business or the economy as a whole, and disease pandemics could temporarily sideline a substantial part of our or our customers' workforce at any particular time. To the extent that such disruptions result in delays or cancellations of customer orders, or the deployment or availability of our products and services, our revenues would be adversely affected. Additionally, any such catastrophic event could cause us to incur significant costs to repair damages to our facilities, equipment and infrastructure.

Changes in accounting principles and guidance, or their interpretation, could result in unfavorable accounting charges or effects, including changes to our previously-filed financial statements, which could cause our stock price to decline.

We prepare our consolidated financial statements in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States. These principles are subject to interpretation by the SEC and various bodies formed to interpret and create appropriate accounting principles and guidance. A change in these principles or guidance, or in their interpretations, may have a significant effect on our reported results and retroactively affect previously reported results. For example, during May 2014, the Financial Accounting Standards Board ("FASB") issued Accounting Standards Update ( " ASU") No. 2014-09, Revenue from Contracts with Customers (Topic 606). The updated standard is effective for us in the first quarter of 2017. We have not selected a transition method and are currently evaluating the effect that the updated standard will have on our consolidated financial statements and related disclosures.

Risks Related to Our Relationship with EMC

As long as EMC controls us, or Class B common stock remains outstanding, other holders of our Class A common stock will have limited ability to influence matters requiring stockholder approval.

As of December 31, 2014 , EMC owned 43,025,000 shares of our Class A common stock and all 300,000,000 shares of our Class B common stock, representing 79.9% of the total outstanding shares of common stock or 97.2% of the voting power of outstanding common stock. The holders of our Class A common stock and our Class B common stock have identical rights, preferences and privileges except with respect to voting and conversion rights, the election of directors, certain actions that require the consent of holders of Class B common stock and other protective provisions as set forth in our certificate of incorporation. Holders of our Class B common stock are entitled to 10 votes per share of Class B common stock on all matters except for the election of our Group II directors, in which case they are entitled to one vote per share, and the holders of our Class A common stock are entitled to one vote per share of Class A common stock. The holders of Class B common stock, voting separately as a class, are entitled to elect 80% of the total number of directors on our board of directors that we would have if there were no vacancies on our board of directors at the time. These are our Group I directors. Subject to any rights of any series of preferred stock to elect directors, the holders of Class A common stock and the holders of Class B common stock, voting together as a single class, are entitled to elect our remaining directors, which at no time will be less than one director-our Group II director(s). Accordingly, the holders of our Class B common stock currently are entitled to elect 8 of our 9 directors.

Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation provides that, if EMC transfers shares of our Class B common stock to any party other than a successor-in-interest or a subsidiary of EMC prior to a distribution to its stockholders under Section 355 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended (a "355 distribution"), those shares will automatically convert into Class A common stock. Additionally, if, prior to a 355 distribution, EMC's ownership falls below 20% of the outstanding shares of our common stock, all outstanding shares of Class B common stock will automatically convert to Class A common stock. Following a 355 distribution, shares of Class B common stock may convert to Class A common stock if such conversion is approved by VMware stockholders after the 355 distribution and we have obtained a private letter ruling from the Internal Revenue Service. In January 2014, the IRS announced in Revenue Procedure 2014-3 that, generally, it would no longer issue private letter rulings on 355 distributions. For so long as EMC or its successor-in-interest beneficially owns shares of our common stock representing at least a majority of the votes entitled to be cast by the holders of outstanding voting stock, EMC will be able to elect all of the members of our board of directors. To the extent that shares of our Class B common stock remain outstanding following a 355 distribution, these shares will remain entitled to 10 votes per share and the holders of our Class A common stock will continue to have limited ability to influence matters requiring stockholder approval. Furthermore, to the extent that shares of our Class B common stock remain outstanding following a 355 distribution, holders of these shares will remain entitled to elect 80% of the total number of directors on our board of directors and the holders of our Class A common stock will continue to have limited ability to elect members of our board of directors.

In addition, until such time as EMC or its successor-in-interest beneficially owns shares of our common stock representing less than a majority of the votes entitled to be cast by the holders of outstanding voting stock, EMC will have the ability to take stockholder action without the vote of any other stockholder and without having to call a stockholder meeting, and holders of our Class A common stock will not be able to affect the outcome of any stockholder vote during this period. As a result, EMC will have the ability to control all matters affecting us, including:

Our certificate of incorporation and the master transaction agreement entered into between us and EMC in connection with our initial public offering ("IPO") also contain provisions that require that as long as EMC beneficially owns at least 20% or

more of the outstanding shares of our common stock, the prior affirmative vote or written consent of EMC (or its successor-in-interest) as the holder of the Class B common stock is required (subject in each case to certain exceptions) in order to authorize us to:

If EMC does not provide any requisite consent allowing us to conduct such activities when requested, we will not be able to conduct such activities and, as a result, our business and our operating results may be harmed. EMC's voting control and its additional rights described above may discourage transactions involving a change of control of us, including transactions in which holders of our Class A common stock might otherwise receive a premium for their shares over the then-current market price. EMC is not prohibited from selling a controlling interest in us to a third party and may do so without the approval of the holders of our Class A common stock and without providing for a purchase of any shares of Class A common stock held by persons other than EMC. Accordingly, shares of Class A common stock may be worth less than they would be if EMC did not maintain voting control over us or if EMC did not have the additional rights described above.

In the event EMC is acquired or otherwise undergoes a change of control, any acquirer or successor will be entitled to exercise the voting control and contractual rights of EMC, and may do so in a manner that could vary significantly from EMC's historic practice.

By becoming a stockholder in our company, holders of our Class A common stock are deemed to have notice of and have consented to the provisions of our certificate of incorporation and the master transaction agreement with respect to the limitations that are described above.

Our business and that of EMC overlap, and EMC may compete with us, which could reduce our market share.

We and EMC are both IT infrastructure companies providing products and services related to storage management, back-up, disaster recovery, security, system management and automation, provisioning and resource management. There can be no assurance that EMC will not engage in increased competition with us in the future. In addition, the intellectual property agreement that we have entered into with EMC provides EMC the ability to use our source code and intellectual property, which, subject to limitations, it may use to produce certain products that compete with ours. EMC's rights in this regard extend to its majority-owned subsidiaries, which could include joint ventures where EMC holds a majority position and one or more of our competitors hold minority positions.

EMC could assert control over us in a manner which could impede our growth or our ability to enter new markets or otherwise adversely affect our business. Further, EMC could utilize its control over us to cause us to take or refrain from taking certain actions, including entering into relationships with channel, technology and other marketing partners, enforcing our intellectual property rights or pursuing business combinations, other corporate opportunities or product development initiatives that could adversely affect our competitive position, including our competitive position relative to that of EMC in markets where we compete with them. In addition, EMC maintains significant partnerships with certain of our competitors, including Microsoft.

EMC's competition in certain markets may affect our ability to build and maintain partnerships.

Our existing and potential partner relationships may be affected by our relationship with EMC. We partner with a number of companies that compete with EMC in certain markets in which EMC participates. EMC's majority ownership in us might affect our ability to effectively partner with these companies. These companies may favor our competitors because of our relationship with EMC.

EMC competes with certain of our significant channel, technology and other marketing partners, including IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Pursuant to our certificate of incorporation and other agreements that we have with EMC, EMC may have the

ability to impact our relationship with those of our partners that compete with EMC, which could have a material adverse effect on our results of operations or our ability to pursue opportunities which may otherwise be available to us.

Our investment in Pivotal Software, Inc. ( " Pivotal, " previously known as " GoPivotal, Inc. " ) may not prove successful. 

In April 2013, we contributed technology and transferred employees to Pivotal, a subsidiary of EMC, established to focus on Big Data and Cloud Application Platforms. Pivotal is led by Paul Maritz, its Chief Executive Officer and our former Chief Executive Officer, and includes most employees and resources formerly working within EMC's Greenplum and Pivotal Labs organizations, and our former vFabric (including Spring and Gemfire), Cloud Foundry and Cetas organizations, as well as related efforts. Pivotal's ability to operate successfully will require, among other factors:

In the event that Pivotal is unable to operate successfully, we may be asked to contribute capital resources to Pivotal or accept dilution in our ownership interest, and we may be unable to realize any value from the technology and resources that we contributed to Pivotal.

In order to preserve the ability for EMC to distribute its shares of our Class B common stock on a tax-free basis, we may be prevented from pursuing opportunities to raise capital, to effectuate acquisitions or to provide equity incentives to our employees, which could hurt our ability to grow.

Beneficial ownership of at least 80% of the total voting power is required in order for EMC to affect a tax-free spin-off of VMware or certain other tax-free transactions. We have agreed that for so long as EMC or its successor-in-interest continues to own greater than 50% of the voting control of our outstanding common stock, we will not knowingly take or fail to take any action that could reasonably be expected to preclude EMC's or its successor-in-interest's ability to undertake a tax-free spin-off. Additionally, under our certificate of incorporation and the master transaction agreement we entered into with EMC, we must obtain the consent of EMC or its successor-in-interest, as the holder of our Class B common stock, to issue stock or other VMware securities, except pursuant to employee benefit plans (provided that we obtain Class B common stockholder approval of the aggregate annual number of shares to be granted under such plans), which could cause us to forgo capital raising or acquisition opportunities that would otherwise be available to us. As a result, we may be precluded from pursuing certain growth initiatives.

Third parties may seek to hold us responsible for liabilities of EMC, which could result in a decrease in our income.

Third parties may seek to hold us responsible for EMC's liabilities. Under our master transaction agreement with EMC, EMC will indemnify us for claims and losses relating to liabilities related to EMC's business and not related to our business. However, if those liabilities are significant and we are ultimately held liable for them, we cannot be certain that we will be able to recover the full amount of our losses from EMC.

Although we have entered into a tax sharing agreement with EMC under which our tax liabilities for most transactions will effectively be determined as if we were not part of any consolidated, combined or unitary tax group of EMC Corporation or its subsidiaries, we nonetheless could be held liable for the tax liabilities of other members of these groups.

We have historically been included in EMC's consolidated group for U.S. federal income tax purposes, as well as in certain consolidated, combined or unitary groups that include EMC Corporation or certain of its subsidiaries for state and local income tax purposes. Pursuant to our tax sharing agreement with EMC, we and EMC generally will make payments to each other such that, with respect to tax returns for any taxable period in which we or any of our subsidiaries are included in EMC's consolidated group for U.S. federal income tax purposes or any other consolidated, combined or unitary group of EMC Corporation or its subsidiaries, the amount of taxes to be paid by us will be determined, subject to certain adjustments, as if we and each of our subsidiaries included in such consolidated, combined or unitary group filed our own consolidated, combined or unitary tax return.

We have been included in the EMC consolidated group for U.S. federal income tax purposes since our acquisition by EMC, and expect to continue to be included in such consolidated group for periods in which EMC owns at least 80% of the total voting power and value of our outstanding stock. Each member of a consolidated group during any part of a consolidated return year is jointly and severally liable for tax on the consolidated return of such year and for any subsequently determined deficiency thereon. Similarly, in some jurisdictions, each member of a consolidated, combined or unitary group for state, local or foreign income tax purposes is jointly and severally liable for the state, local or foreign income tax liability of each other

member of the consolidated, combined or unitary group. Accordingly, for any period in which we are included in the EMC consolidated group for U.S. federal income tax purposes or any other consolidated, combined or unitary group of EMC Corporation and/or its subsidiaries, we could be liable in the event that any income tax liability was incurred, but not discharged, by any other member of any such group.

Any inability to resolve favorably any disputes that arise between us and EMC with respect to our past and ongoing relationships may result in a significant reduction of our revenues and earnings.

Disputes may arise between EMC and us in a number of areas relating to our ongoing relationships, including:

We may not be able to resolve any potential conflicts, and even if we do, the resolution may be less favorable than if we were dealing with an unaffiliated party.

The agreements we enter into with EMC may be amended upon agreement between the parties. While we are controlled by EMC, we may not have the leverage to negotiate amendments to these agreements if required on terms as favorable to us as those we would negotiate with an unaffiliated third party.

Our CEO and some of our directors own EMC common stock or equity awards to acquire EMC common stock, and some of our directors hold management positions with EMC, which could cause conflicts of interests that result in our not acting on opportunities we otherwise may have.

Our CEO and some of our directors own EMC common stock or equity awards to purchase EMC common stock. In addition, some of our directors are executive officers or directors of EMC, and EMC, as the sole holder of our Class B common stock, is entitled to elect 8 of our 9 directors. Ownership of EMC common stock, restricted shares of EMC common stock and equity awards to purchase EMC common stock by our directors and the presence of executive officers or directors of EMC on our board of directors could create, or appear to create, conflicts of interest with respect to matters involving both us and EMC that could have different implications for EMC than they do for us. Provisions of our certificate of incorporation and the master transaction agreement between EMC and us address corporate opportunities that are presented to our directors or officers that are also directors or officers of EMC. There can be no assurance that the provisions in our certificate of incorporation or the master transaction agreement will adequately address potential conflicts of interest or that potential conflicts of interest will be resolved in our favor, or that we will be able to take advantage of corporate opportunities presented to individuals who are officers or directors of both us and EMC. As a result, we may be precluded from pursuing certain growth initiatives.

EMC's ability to control our board of directors may make it difficult for us to recruit independent directors.

So long as EMC beneficially owns shares of our common stock representing at least a majority of the votes entitled to be cast by the holders of outstanding voting stock, EMC can effectively control and direct our board of directors. Further, the interests of EMC and our other stockholders may diverge. Under these circumstances, persons who might otherwise accept our invitation to join our board of directors may decline.

We are a "controlled company" within the meaning of the New York Stock Exchange rules and, as a result, are relying on exemptions from certain corporate governance requirements that provide protection to stockholders of companies that are not "controlled companies."

EMC owns more than 50% of the total voting power of our common stock and, as a result, we are a "controlled company" under the New York Stock Exchange corporate governance standards. As a controlled company, we are exempt under the New York Stock Exchange standards from the obligation to comply with certain New York Stock Exchange corporate governance requirements, including the requirements:

While we have voluntarily caused our Compensation and Corporate Governance Committee to currently be composed entirely of independent directors, reflecting the requirements of the New York Stock Exchange, we are not required to maintain the independent composition of the committee. As a result of our use of the "controlled company" exemptions, holders of our Class A common stock will not have the same protection afforded to stockholders of companies that are subject to all of the New York Stock Exchange corporate governance requirements.

Our historical financial information as a majority-owned subsidiary of EMC may not be representative of the results of a completely independent public company.

The financial information covering the periods included in this Annual Report on Form 10-K does not necessarily reflect what our financial condition, results of operations or cash flows would have been had we been a completely independent entity during those periods. In certain geographic regions where we do not have an established legal entity, we contract with EMC subsidiaries for support services and EMC personnel who are managed by us. The costs incurred by EMC on our behalf related to these employees are passed on to us and we are charged a mark-up intended to approximate costs that would have been charged had we contracted for such services with an unrelated third party. These costs are included as expenses in our consolidated statements of income. Additionally, we and EMC engage in intercompany transactions, including agreements regarding the use of EMC's and our intellectual property and real estate, agreements regarding the sale of goods and services to one another and to Pivotal, and an agreement for EMC to resell our products and services to third party customers. If EMC were to distribute its shares of our common stock to its stockholders or otherwise divest itself of all or a significant portion of its VMware shares, there would be numerous implications to VMware, including the fact that VMware would lose the benefit of these arrangements with EMC. There can be no assurance that VMware would be able to renegotiate these arrangements with EMC or replace them on the same or similar terms. Additionally, our business could face significant disruption and uncertainty as we transition from these arrangements with EMC. Moreover, our historical financial information is not necessarily indicative of what our financial condition, results of operations or cash flows will be in the future if and when we contract at arm's length with independent third parties for the services we have received and currently receive from EMC. During the year ended December 31, 2014 , we recognized revenues of $318 million , and as of December 31, 2014 , $317 million of sales were included in unearned revenues from such transactions with EMC. For additional information, see "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" and our consolidated financial statements and notes thereto.

Risks Related to Owning Our Class A Common Stock

The price of our Class A common stock has fluctuated substantially in recent years and may fluctuate substantially in the future.

The trading price of our Class A common stock has fluctuated significantly since our IPO in August 2007. For example, between January 1, 2014 and December 31, 2014, the closing trading price of our Class A common stock was volatile, ranging between $76.43 and $111.80 per share. Our trading price could fluctuate substantially in the future due to the factors discussed in this Risk Factors section and elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Substantial amounts of Class A common stock are held by our employees and EMC, and all of the shares of our Class B common stock, which may be converted to Class A common stock upon request of the holder, are held by EMC. Shares of Class A common stock held by EMC (including shares of Class A common stock that might be issued upon the conversion of Class B common stock) are eligible for sale subject to the volume, manner of sale and other restrictions of Rule 144 of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"), which allows the holder to sell up to the greater of 1% of our

outstanding Class A common stock or our four-week average weekly trading volume during any three-month period and following the expiration of their contractual restrictions. Additionally, EMC possesses registration rights with respect to the shares of our common stock that it holds. If EMC chooses to exercise such rights, its sale of the shares that are registered would not be subject to the Rule 144 limitations. Additionally, the provisions of our charter documents and the agreements that we entered into with EMC prior to our IPO enable EMC to elect to distribute all of its holdings of our Class A and Class B common stock to EMC stockholders and require us to register the shares so they could be resold in the public trading markets. If a significant amount of the shares that become eligible for resale enter the public trading markets in a short period of time, the market price of our Class A common stock may decline. Additionally, if our Class B common stock is distributed to EMC stockholders and remains outstanding, it would trade separately from and potentially at a premium to our Class A common stock, and could thereby contribute additional volatility to the price of our Class A common stock.

Additionally, broad market and industry factors may decrease the market price of our Class A common stock, regardless of our actual operating performance. The stock market in general and technology companies in particular have often experienced extreme price and volume fluctuations. In addition, in the past, following periods of volatility in the overall market and the market price of a company's securities, securities class action litigation has often been instituted, including against us, and, if not resolved swiftly, can result in substantial costs and a diversion of management's attention and resources.

If securities or industry analysts change their recommendations regarding our stock adversely, our stock price and trading volume could decline.

The trading market for our Class A common stock is influenced by the research and reports that industry or securities analysts publish about us, our business, our market or our competitors. If any of the analysts who cover us change their recommendation regarding our stock adversely, or provide more favorable relative recommendations about our competitors, our stock price would likely decline.

Delaware law and our certificate of incorporation and bylaws contain anti-takeover provisions that could delay or discourage takeover attempts that stockholders may consider favorable.

Provisions in our certificate of incorporation and bylaws will have the effect of delaying or preventing a change of control or changes in our management. These provisions include the following:

Until such time as EMC or its successor-in-interest ceases to beneficially own 20% or more of the outstanding shares of our common stock, the affirmative vote or written consent of the holders of a majority of the outstanding shares of the Class B common stock will be required to:

In addition, we have elected to apply the provisions of Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation Law. These provisions may prohibit large stockholders, in particular those owning 15% or more of our outstanding voting stock, from merging or combining with us. These provisions in our certificate of incorporation and bylaws and under Delaware law could discourage potential takeover attempts and could reduce the price that investors might be willing to pay for shares of our common stock.

None.

As of December 31, 2014, we owned or leased the facilities described below: 

____________________________

We believe that our current facilities are suitable for our current employee headcount and will sustain us through 2015, but we intend to add new facilities or expand existing facilities as we add employees and expand our operations. We believe that suitable additional or substitute space will be available as needed to accommodate expansion of our operations.

Refer to Note L to the consolidated financial statements in Part II, Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for a description of legal proceedings. See also the risk factor entitled "We may become involved in litigation and regulatory inquiries and proceedings that could negatively affect us" in Part I, Item 1A of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for a discussion of potential risks to our results of operations and financial condition that may arise from legal proceedings.

Not Applicable.

EXECUTIVE OFFICERS OF THE REGISTRANT

The names of executive officers and their ages as of February 20, 2015, are as follows:

Patrick P. Gelsinger has been the Chief Executive Officer and a Director of VMware since September 1, 2012. Prior to joining VMware, he served as President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure Products at EMC, VMware's parent company and controlling stockholder, from September 2009 to August 2012. Mr. Gelsinger joined EMC from Intel Corporation, a designer and manufacturer of advanced integrated digital technology platforms, where he was Senior Vice President and Co-General Manager of Intel Corporation's Digital Enterprise Group from 2005 to September 2009 and served as Intel's Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer from 2002 to 2005. Prior to this, Mr. Gelsinger led Intel's Desktop Products Group.

Carl M. Eschenbach was appointed Chief Operating Officer and Co-President of VMware in April 2012 and became President and Chief Operating Officer in December 2012. Mr. Eschenbach had previously served as VMware's Co-President, Customer Operations from January 2011 to April 2012 and as VMware's Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations from May 2005 to January 2011. Prior to joining VMware in 2002, he was Vice President of North America Sales at Inktomi from 2000 to 2002. He also held various sales management positions with 3Com Corporation, Lucent Technologies Inc. and EMC. Mr. Eschenbach currently serves on the board of Palo Alto Networks.

Jonathan C. Chadwick has served as VMware's Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President since August 2014. Mr. Chadwick joined VMware as its Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President on November 2012. Previously, Mr. Chadwick had been Chief Financial Officer of Skype, a provider of Internet-based voice communication, since March 2011, and a Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Corporation since its acquisition of Skype in October 2011. Mr. Chadwick joined Skype from McAfee, an antivirus software and computer security company, where he was the Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer from June 2010 until February 2011, when McAfee was acquired by Intel Corporation. From 1997 to 2010, Mr. Chadwick held various finance roles at Cisco Systems, a networking equipment company. At Cisco, Mr. Chadwick served as Senior Vice President, CFO - Global Customer Markets from July 2009 to June 2010, Senior Vice President, Corporate Controller and Principal Accounting Officer from June 2007 until July 2009, Vice President, Corporate Controller and Principal Accounting Officer from September 2006 to June 2007 and Vice President, Corporate Finance & Planning from February 2001 to September 2006. Mr. Chadwick currently serves on the board of F5 Networks, Inc.

Sanjay Poonen has served as VMware's Executive Vice President and General Manager, End-User Computing since August 2013. Prior to joining VMware, he spent more than seven years at SAP AG, serving as President and Corporate Officer of Platform Solutions and the Mobile Division from April 2012 until July 2013, prior to that as President of Global Solutions from November 2010 to March 2012, as Executive Vice President of Performance Optimization Apps from June 2008 to September 2009 and Senior Vice President of Analytics from April 2006 to May 2008. Mr. Poonen's over 20 years of technology industry experience also included executive-level positions with Symantec and Veritas, and product management and engineering positions with Alphablox, Apple, Inc. and Microsoft Corporation.

Rangarajan (Raghu) Raghuram has served as VMware's Executive Vice President, Software-Define Data Center Division since April 2012. Mr. Raghuram joined VMware in 2003 and has held multiple product management and marketing roles. Mr. Raghuram served as Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Infrastructure and Management, Virtualization and Cloud Platforms, and Enterprise Products, from December 2009 through March 2012. Mr. Raghuram previously served as Vice President of VMware's Server Business Unit and of Product and Solutions Marketing from September 2003 through December 2009. Prior to VMware, Mr. Raghuram held product management and marketing roles at Netscape and Bang Networks.

S. Dawn Smith has been the Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary at VMware since September 2009 and Chief Compliance Officer since August 2010. Prior to joining VMware, Ms. Smith was a partner at Morrison & Foerster LLP, a law firm, since January 2008 and served as an attorney since 2005. Prior to joining Morrison & Foerster LLP, she was an attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati P.C.

PART II

Market Information

Our Class A common stock, par value $0.01 per share, trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol VMW.

The following table sets forth the range of high and low sales prices of our Class A common stock on the New York Stock Exchange for the past two years during the fiscal periods shown. Our Class B common stock is not publicly traded.

Holders

We had 51 holders of record of our Class A common stock, and one holder of record, EMC Corporation ("EMC"), of our Class B common stock as of February 20, 2015.

Dividends

Subsequent to our initial public offering in August 2007, we have not declared or paid cash dividends on our common stock. We currently do not anticipate declaring any cash dividends in the foreseeable future. Any future determination to declare cash dividends will be made at the discretion of our board of directors, subject to the consent of the holders of our Class B common stock pursuant to our certificate of incorporation. Holders of our Class A common stock and our Class B common stock will share equally on a per share basis in any dividend declared on our common stock by our board of directors.

Recent Sales of Unregistered Securities

None.

Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities

Issuer purchases of Class A common stock during the quarter ended December 31, 2014:

depend on a variety of factors, including VMware's stock price, cash requirements for operations and business combinations, corporate and regulatory requirements and other market and economic conditions. Purchases under our stock repurchase program can be discontinued at any time that we feel additional purchases are not warranted.

Stock Performance Graph

The graph below compares the cumulative total stockholder return on our Class A common stock with the cumulative total return on the S&P 500 Index and the S&P 500 Systems Software index for the period beginning on December 31, 2009 through December 31, 2014, assuming an initial investment of $100. Historically, we have not declared or paid cash dividends on our common stock, while the data for the S&P 500 Index and the S&P 500 Systems Software Index assume reinvestment of dividends.    

Note: The stock price performance shown on the graph above is not necessarily indicative of future price performance. This graph shall not be deemed "filed" for purposes of Section 18 of the Exchange Act or otherwise subject to the liabilities of that section nor shall it be deemed incorporated by reference in any filing under the Securities Act or the Exchange Act, regardless of any general incorporation language in such filing.

FIVE-YEAR SELECTED CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL DATA

(amounts in millions, except per share amounts, and shares in thousands)

All dollar amounts expressed as numbers in this MD&A (except share and per share amounts) are in millions. Period-over-period changes are calculated based upon the respective underlying, non-rounded data. Unless the context requires otherwise, we are referring to VMware, Inc. and its consolidated subsidiaries when we use the terms "VMware," the "Company," "we," "our" or "us."

Overview

The information technology ("IT") industry is transforming, moving from a hardware based traditional model to one of a software-defined infrastructure. We are the leader in virtualization infrastructure solutions utilized by organizations to help transform the way they build, deliver and consume IT resources. We develop and market our product and service offerings within three main product groups and we also leverage synergies across these three product and service areas:

Historically, the majority of our license sales have been from our standalone vSphere product, which is included in our compute product category within our SDDC architecture. However, over the last two years, the growth rate of our standalone vSphere product license sales has declined as certain large markets for data center server virtualization have matured.  The growth rate of license sales beyond our standalone vSphere product has increased over this period as we transition to offering a wider range of products and services to enable the entire SDDC. As the transformation of the IT industry continues, we expect that our growth rates will be increasingly derived from sales of our newer products, suites and services solutions across our SDDC portfolio, beyond standalone vSphere. For example, we have experienced continued growth in sales volumes, production use and number of customers who have purchased VMware NSX, our network virtualization solution, throughout 2014. We also continue to see traction of our Virtual SAN product and other newer offerings.

Hybrid cloud computing, comprising of VMware vCloud Air, VMware vCloud Air Network Service Providers Program and vCloud Air Business Ventures offerings have also experienced growth throughout 2014. We continue to expand our hybrid cloud global footprint as well as our service offerings. Revenues from these offerings are recognized over a period of time.

We acquired AirWatch during the first quarter of 2014. AirWatch expands our portfolio of mobile solutions within the enterprise mobile and security space and we are in the early stages of growing this business by leveraging the reach of our global presence, robust channel and access to enterprise accounts via our sales force. Currently, our AirWatch business models include an on-premise solution that we offer through the sale of perpetual licenses and an off-premise solution that we offer as software-as-a-service. AirWatch products and services contributed to the growth we experienced in sales of our end-user computing products during 2014. Our investments in AirWatch resulted in increased operating expenses during 2014, primarily driven by employee-related costs, including expenses we recognized in connection with installment payments to certain key employees as part of the acquisition, as well as amortization of purchased intangible assets.

We generally sell our solutions using enterprise license agreements ("ELAs") or as part of our non-ELA, or transactional, business. ELAs are comprehensive volume license offerings, offered both directly by us and through certain channel partners that also provide for multi-year maintenance and support.

Results of Operations

In connection with our contribution to Pivotal Software, Inc. ("Pivotal"), during 2013, we transferred certain assets and liabilities to Pivotal in exchange for ownership interest in Pivotal of approximately 28%. We also transferred approximately 415 of our employees to Pivotal during 2013. While the contribution to Pivotal has had a negative impact on our revenue growth rate in primarily 2013 compared to 2012, our operating margin has been positively impacted due to the elimination of Pivotal related costs from our consolidated statements of income.

Revenues

Our revenues during the years ended 2014 , 2013 and 2012 were as follows:

License Revenues

License revenues were up 14% in 2014 and 9% in 2013. Our license revenue growth rate was favorably impacted during 2014 compared to 2013 as a result of increased sales of our integrated product suites, including VMware vCloud Suite and vSphere with Operations Management. Our customers continue transitioning to purchasing our suite solutions rather than products such as vSphere that are sold on a standalone basis. Our integrated product suites include various product offerings and are generally sold at a higher price than our products that are sold on an individual basis. Additionally, revenue from our network virtualization solution, VMware NSX, as well as our end-user computing products, including AirWatch mobile solutions, also contributed to the increase in license revenues. We expect that sales of our non-standalone vSphere products will continue to increase as a percentage of total revenues.

Revenues from AirWatch include revenues recognized from our software-as-a-service ("SaaS") offerings. SaaS revenues are included in both license and software maintenance revenues, and while the amounts have not been material for all periods presented, we expect these revenues and those from our hybrid cloud offerings to form an increasing percentage of our revenues in future periods. The anticipated revenue growth of our hybrid cloud and SaaS revenues are expected to adversely impact the growth rate of our license revenues in 2015 as we will recognize less revenue up-front than we would otherwise recognize as part of a multi-year license arrangement. Additionally, changes in foreign currency are also expected to have an impact on our license revenues. Refer to our Foreign Currency discussion below for further information.

Our revenues for 2013 increased due to overall increased global sales volumes in all major geographies, slightly offset by the disposition of certain business lines under our realignment plan and the contribution to Pivotal. License revenues related to Pivotal and all dispositions under our realignment plan were $18 in 2013 as compared to $56 in 2012.

Services Revenues

In 2014 and 2013, software maintenance revenues benefited from renewals, multi-year software maintenance contracts sold in previous periods, and additional maintenance contracts sold in conjunction with new software license sales. In each period presented, customers bought, on average, more than 24 months of support and maintenance with each new license purchased, which we believe demonstrates our customers' commitment to our SDDC strategy.

In 2013, our services revenue growth rate was negatively impacted by the contribution to Pivotal and the disposition of other net assets under our realignment plan. Service revenues related to Pivotal and all dispositions under our realignment plan were $37 in 2013 as compared to $143 in 2012.

In 2014 and 2013, professional services revenues increased as growth in our license sales and increased complexity of our product suite led to additional demand for our professional services. As we continue to invest in our partners and expand our ecosystem of third-party professionals with expertise in our solutions to independently provide professional services to our customers, our professional services revenue will vary based on the delivery channels used in any given period as well as the timing of engagements.

Foreign Currency

Although approximately 70% of our sales are denominated in the U.S. dollar, we also invoice and collect in the euro, the British pound, the Japanese yen, the Australian dollar and the Chinese renminbi in their respective regions. As a result, a portion of our total revenues are affected by changes in the value of the U.S. dollar against these currencies. Transactions denominated in foreign currency are converted to the U.S. dollar upon booking of the transaction using the monthly exchange rate. Although the U.S. dollar strengthened against most foreign currencies during the fourth quarter of 2014, foreign currency fluctuations did not have a material impact when comparing license revenues in 2014 and 2013 to their respective prior years. However, even if currency exchange rates stabilize, we would still anticipate a negative impact both on our license and total revenue growth rates in 2015.

Unearned Revenues

Our unearned revenues as of December 31, 2014 and December 31, 2013 were as follows:

Unearned license revenues are generally recognized upon delivery of existing or future products or services, or they are otherwise recognized ratably over the term of the arrangement. Future products include, in some cases, emerging products that are offered as part of product promotions where the purchaser of an existing product is entitled to receive the future product at no additional charge. To the extent the future product has not been delivered and vendor-specific objective evidence ("VSOE") of fair value cannot be established, the revenue for the entire order is deferred until such time as all product delivery obligations have been fulfilled. In the event the arrangement does not include professional services, unearned license revenue may also be recognized ratably, if the customer is granted the right to receive unspecified future products or VSOE of fair value on the software maintenance element of the arrangement does not exist. Total unearned license revenues may vary over periods for a variety of factors, including the type and level of promotions offered, and the timing of when the products are delivered upon general availability.

Unearned software maintenance revenues are primarily attributable to our maintenance contracts and are generally recognized ratably over the contract period. The weighted-average remaining term at December 31, 2014 was approximately 2 years . Unearned professional services revenues result primarily from prepaid professional services, including training, and are generally recognized as the services are delivered.

Cost of License and Services Revenues, and Operating Expenses

Our cost of services revenues and operating expenses were primarily impacted by increasing headcount. Headcount during the year ended December 31, 2014 continued to increase due primarily to organic growth and the AirWatch acquisition. The increased headcount has resulted in higher cash and stock-based employee-related expenses across most of our income statement expense categories when compared to the same periods in 2013, and we expect this trend to continue.

Cost of License Revenues

Our cost of license revenues principally consists of the cost of fulfillment of our software, royalty costs in connection with technology licensed from third-party providers and amortization of intangible assets and capitalized software. The cost of fulfillment of our software includes IT development efforts, personnel costs and related overhead associated with the physical and electronic delivery of our software products.

Cost of license revenues decreased in 2014 compared to 2013 primarily due to a decrease of $34 in amortization of capitalized software development costs, which was partially offset by an increase of $17 in amortization of intangible assets.

Cost of license revenues decreased in 2013 compared to 2012 primarily due to a decrease of $37 in amortization of capitalized software and a decrease of $11 in IT development costs. These decreases were partially offset by an increase of $18 in intangible amortization expense.

No amortization expenses was recorded during the year ended December 31, 2014 as all previously capitalized software development costs had been fully amortized as of December 31, 2013 . We do not expect significant amortization of capitalized software development costs in future years.

Cost of Services Revenues

Our cost of services revenues primarily includes the costs of personnel and related overhead to deliver technical support for our products and to provide our professional services. Additionally, our costs of services revenues include costs related to our IT development efforts and depreciation on equipment supporting our service offerings. As we continue to invest in and grow business from our SaaS and professional services offerings, we expect our total costs of services revenues to continue to increase.

Cost of services revenues increased in 2014 compared to 2013 primarily driven by the investment and growth in our SaaS and professional services offerings, which led to higher costs. The increase includes growth in cash-based employee-related expenses of $124 due to incremental growth in headcount, both organic and through acquisitions, and an increase in technical support costs of $21. Additionally, increases of $25 in equipment and depreciation costs also contributed to the increases in cost of services revenues. The increase in 2014 was partially offset by a decrease of $10 in operating expenses related to Pivotal.

Cost of services revenues increased in 2013 compared to 2012 primarily due to an increase of $39 in cash-based employee-related expenses and an increase of $27 in costs we incurred to provide technical support. These increases were generally proportional to the increases in services revenues for the same comparable period. Equipment and depreciation costs also contributed to the increase in cost of services revenues. The increases were partially offset by a decrease of $32 of operating expenses related to Pivotal.

Research and Development Expenses

Our research and development expenses include the personnel and related overhead associated with the development of our product software and service offerings.

Research and development expenses increased in 2014 compared to 2013. The increases were primarily due to growth in cash-based employee-related expenses of $125 and increases in stock-based compensation of $17, driven by incremental growth in headcount, both organic and through acquisitions. Equipment and depreciation expenses increased by $27 in 2014. The increase in 2014 was partially offset by a decrease of $15 in research and development expenses related to Pivotal.

Research and development expenses increased in 2013 compared to 2012 primarily due to growth in cash-based employee-related expenses of $85, which was primarily driven by planned incremental growth in headcount. Additionally, contractor costs, stock-based compensation expense and equipment and depreciation expenses also increased by $48 during 2013 compared to the prior year. The increases in expenses were partially offset by a decrease of $59 of research and development expenses related to Pivotal.

Sales and Marketing Expenses

Our sales and marketing expenses include personnel costs, sales commissions and related overhead associated with the sale and marketing of our license and services offerings, as well as the cost of product launches. Sales commissions are generally earned and expensed when a firm order is received from the customer. Sales and marketing expenses also include the net impact from the expenses incurred and fees generated by certain marketing initiatives, such as our annual VMworld U.S. and VMworld Europe conferences.

Sales and marketing expenses increased in 2014 compared to 2013 primarily driven by growth in cash-based employee-related expenses of $240 and an increase in stock-based compensation expense of $29 due to incremental growth in headcount, both organic and through acquisitions. Costs incurred for travel and marketing programs also increased by $48 in 2014 compared 2013. The increase in expenses in 2014 was partially offset by a decrease of $10 in sales and marketing expenses related to Pivotal.

Sales and marketing expenses increased in 2013 compared to 2012 primarily due to growth in cash-based employee-related expenses of $174, including, incremental growth in headcount and by higher commission expense due to increased sales volumes. To a lesser extent, costs incurred for marketing programs also contributed to the increase of expense in 2013, compared to prior year. The increases in expenses in 2013 were partially offset by a decrease of $44 of sales and marketing expenses related to Pivotal.

General and Administrative Expenses

Our general and administrative expenses include personnel and related overhead costs to support the overall business. These expenses include the costs associated with our finance, human resources, IT infrastructure and legal, as well as expenses related to corporate costs and initiatives.

General and administrative expenses increased in 2014 compared to 2013. We have made and will continue to make installment payments to certain key employees of AirWatch subject to the achievement of specified future employment conditions. We recognized compensation expense of $141 in 2014 relating to these installment payments. Other cash-based employee-related expenses increased by $52 in 2014 due to incremental growth in headcount, both organic and through acquisitions. Costs of $11 related to certain litigation and other contingencies, and amounts for IT development costs and stock-based compensation expense further contributed to the increase in expenses in 2014 compared to 2013.

General and administrative expenses increased in 2013 compared to 2012 due to incremental growth in headcount resulting in an increase of $19 in cash-based employee-related expenses. The increase in 2013 compared to 2012 was also due to an increase in charitable donations, stock-based compensation expense and contractor expenses.

Realignment Charges

During the second half of 2014, we eliminated approximately 180 positions across all major functional groups and geographies to streamline our operations. As a result of these actions, $16 of realignment charges was recognized in 2014 on the consolidated statements of income, which consisted of workforce reduction charges. As of December 31, 2014 , $8 remained in accrued expenses and other on the consolidated balance sheets and is expected to be paid during 2015.

Realignment charges in 2013 were incurred in connection with the realignment plan we initiated in January 2013. The plan included the elimination of approximately 710 positions and personnel across all major functional groups and geographies. The total cash and non-cash charges for workforce reductions of $54 and costs primarily associated with asset impairments of $14 were recorded on the consolidated statements of income in 2013. The realignment plan was completed by the end of December 31, 2013.

Interest Expense with EMC

Interest expense with EMC of $24 in 2014, representing an increase of $21 compared to 2013 primarily as a result of the additional debt that we obtained from EMC in connection with the AirWatch acquisition and the change of interest rate from 90-day LIBOR plus 55 basis points to a fixed rate of 1.75%. Refer to "Our Relationship with EMC" discussion below for further information.

Other Income (Expense), Net

Other income (expense), net in 2013 was primarily due to the recognition of a pre-tax gain of $44 as a result of exiting certain lines of business under our business realignment plan. Partially offsetting this gain was an other-than-temporary impairment charge of $13 that we recognized in connection with a strategic investment.

Income Tax Provision

Our annual effective income tax rate was 15.5% , 11.6% and 16.5% for 2014, 2013, and 2012, respectively. Our effective rate in 2014 is higher than 2013 primarily due to the fact that the 2013 effective tax rate includes the benefit of the federal research tax credit for both 2013 and 2012, whereas the 2014 effective tax rate only includes the benefit of the federal research tax credit for 2014. Our annual effective tax rate in 2012 does not include any benefit from the federal research tax credit.

Our rate of taxation in foreign jurisdictions is lower than our U.S. tax rate. Our foreign earnings are primarily earned by our subsidiaries organized in Ireland, and as such, our annual effective tax rate can be significantly impacted by the mix of our earnings in the U.S. and foreign jurisdictions.

During October 2014, Ireland announced revisions to its tax regulations that will require income earned by our subsidiaries organized in Ireland to be taxed at higher rates. We will be impacted by the changes in tax regulations in Ireland beginning in 2021. All income earned abroad, except for previously taxed income for U.S. tax purposes, is considered indefinitely reinvested in our non-U.S. operations and no provision for U.S. taxes has been provided with respect to such income. As of December 31, 2014 and 2013 , the undistributed earnings of our non-U.S. subsidiaries were approximately $3,594 and $2,830 , respectively. Our intent is to indefinitely reinvest our non-U.S. funds in our foreign operations, and our current plans do not demonstrate a need to repatriate them to fund our U.S. operations. At this time, it is not practicable to estimate the amount of tax that may be payable if we were to repatriate these earnings.

We are included in the EMC consolidated group for U.S. federal income tax purposes, and expect to continue to be included in such consolidated group for periods in which EMC owns at least 80% of the total voting power and value of our combined outstanding Class A and Class B common stock as calculated for U.S. federal income tax purposes. The percentage of voting power and value calculated for U.S. federal income tax purposes may differ from the percentage of outstanding shares

beneficially owned by EMC due to the greater voting power of our Class B common stock as compared to our Class A common stock and other factors. Each member of a consolidated group during any part of a consolidated return year is jointly and severally liable for tax on the consolidated return of such year and for any subsequently determined deficiency thereon. Should EMC's ownership fall below 80% of the total voting power or value of our outstanding stock in any period, then we would no longer be included in the EMC consolidated group for U.S. federal income tax purposes, and our U.S. federal income tax would be reported separately from that of the EMC consolidated group.

Although we file a consolidated federal tax return with EMC, the income tax provision is calculated primarily as though we were a separate taxpayer. However, certain transactions that we and EMC are parties to are assessed using consolidated tax return rules. Our effective tax rate in the periods presented is the result of the mix of income earned in various tax jurisdictions that apply a broad range of income tax rates. The rate at which the provision for income taxes is calculated differs from the U.S. federal statutory income tax rate primarily due to different tax rates in foreign jurisdictions where income is earned.

The EMC consolidated group is routinely under audit by the Internal Revenue Service (the "IRS"). All U.S. federal income tax matters have been concluded for years through 2008. The IRS commenced a federal income tax audit for the tax years 2009 and 2010 in the third quarter of 2012. The current federal income tax audit is ongoing, and it is not expected to be completed until 2015.

We also have income tax audits in progress in numerous state and local jurisdictions. In our international jurisdictions that comprise a significant portion of our operations, the years that may be examined vary, with the earliest year being 2008. In our most significant international jurisdiction, Ireland, the open tax years begin as of 2010. Based on the timing and outcome of examinations of our international subsidiaries, the result of the expiration of statutes of limitations for specific jurisdictions or the timing and result of ruling requests from taxing authorities, it is reasonably possible that within the next 12 months total unrecognized tax benefits could be potentially reduced by approximately  $14 . Audit outcomes and the timing of audit settlements are subject to significant uncertainty.

Our future effective tax rate may be affected by such factors as changes in tax laws, changes in our business, regulations, or rates, changing interpretation of existing laws or regulations, the impact of accounting for stock-based compensation, the impact of accounting for business combinations and shifts in the amount of earnings in the U.S. compared with other regions in the world as well as the expiration of statute of limitations and settlements of audits.

Our Relationship with EMC

As of December 31, 2014 , EMC owned 43,025,000 shares of Class A common stock and all 300,000,000 shares of Class B common stock, representing 79.9% of our total outstanding shares of common stock and 97.2% of the combined voting power of our outstanding common stock.

The information provided below includes a summary of the transactions entered into with EMC and EMC's consolidated subsidiaries (collectively "EMC"), including VCE Company LLC ("VCE") from the date EMC acquired its controlling interest in VCE through December 31, 2014.

Transactions with EMC

We and EMC engage in the following ongoing intercompany transactions, which resulted in revenues and receipts and unearned revenues for us:

Information about our revenues and receipts and unearned revenues from such arrangements with EMC for the years ended December 31, 2014 , 2013 and 2012 consisted of the following: