How is this for Silicon Valley irony: Ignored by venture capitalists (VCs) chasing dotcom dreams, a real technology firm builds great products and has s record-breaking initial public offering (IPO).

When Diane Greene was making the VC rounds to present VMware, the company she and four other engineers founded in 1998, she barely elicited any interest. It was the go-go years of the tech bubble and marketing plans fashionably hinging on the Internet and pitched by Ivy League and California MBAs were getting all the attention and funding.

Hers was a real software firm with real products constructed by actual engineers and computer scientists.

VMware stuck to its knitting, built innovative, robust products and worked closely with its customers, all the while evangelizing the broader market. VMware's ingenious products make x86-based computers operating-system-agnostic. The computer can run several operating systems at the same time, or several instances of the same operating system at once. This technology brought immediate efficiency to the software engineering cognoscenti-they could develop and test applications on different operating systems on the same machine.

For the rest of us, it meant that our datacenters could be hugely more efficient-servers that sucked power 100 percent of the time and normally worked 5 percent to 10 percent of capacity now worked 80 percent of the time. The math is compelling.Datacenter consolidation is at ratios over 10:1. There is more computing with less hardware, and utility bills for running the machines and then cooling them are cut by 80 percent. Plus, there is more productivity with no increase in headcount. It's true romance among CIOs, CFOs and the Green Movement, thanks to VMware's consistently clever engineers. Their software does server, storage, network and desktop virtualization and its Infrastructure 3 is a truly distributed, automated pool of resources.

Virtualization provides more flexibility, more effective utilization and more powerful security and reliability.

Bought by EMC in 2004 for $625 million, VMware grew its revenue 82 percent to $703.9 million between 2005 and 2006. The company has had the most successful IPO of the year, coming out at $29 a share and closing at $51, up 76 percent.

VMware's coming out has been compared to Google. And like Google, industry observers expect Greene to use her treasure to compete for the best computer programmers on the planet.

So much for the judgment of those Silicon Valley VCs 10 years ago.

Greene notes that VMware runs on just 5 percent of the servers in use. With the announcement a few months ago of VMware's new embedded hypervisor, the ESX3i, many significant x86-based hardware vendors say they plan to ship their servers with the embedded ESX software in them.

Greene says that "the adoption of the World Wide Web for commerce and business communication is the signal event of the past 15 years." Clearly, it's driving the demand for computing, which in turn will drive the demand for virtualization.

Where are we going? Greene says, "VMware-style virtualization will revolutionize the way people do datacenters and that is a big deal, but still not as impactful as the World Wide Web has been and will continue to evolve."

What does the future hold? "Virtual worlds will become the user interface for the Web," she predicts. "The somewhat static Web site that you browse today will evolve into being a virtual world where interaction is dynamic and one of full immersion," she says.

In other words, geek heaven.