CEO out at VMware; former Microsoft exec in
Diane Greene
(Credit: CNET)VMware announced on Tuesday the abrupt departure of founder and CEO Diane Greene, replacing her with former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz.
The virtualization software also warned that full-year revenue will be "modestly below the previous guidance of 50 percent growth over 2007." The company did not update its guidance for the just-ended quarter, saying it will report results as scheduled on July 22.
VMware shares plummeted on the news, changing hands recently at $39.50, down $13.69 or more than 25 percent.
The company's revenue warning is the second recent financial hiccup for VMware, which also reported disappointing earnings in January.
Paul Maritz
(Credit: EMC)Maritz, who spent 14 years at Microsoft, had been at former VMware parent EMC since February, when the storage giant bought Maritz's start-up, Pi.
Although VMWare issued a nice statement praising Greene for her contributions, the company made it clear that the decision for Greene to leave was made by the board.
"VMware's Board of Directors announced today that it has made a change in the leadership of the company with the departure of Diane Greene as president and CEO," the company said.
The move comes as VMware faces stepped-up competition in the virtualization field it has dominated, including from Maritz's former employer, Microsoft.
VMware's fortunes have shifted drastically since the company launched a wildly successful IPO last summer. The company's stock rose from an initial price of $29 per share to a high of $55.50 in its first day of trading.
EMC purchased VMware for approximately $635 million in 2003.
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina. 
I recently was asked by a Fortune 1000 company to determine what to use for their virtualization needs. They immediately suggest to me to that VMWare seems to be the right direction to go. After a few presentations and talks, they got hook on KVM. There were many folds benefit. The most important was the functionality to achieve what they need. The second was cost. Since virtualization is simply running their SaaS in an image file, they don't see the needs to choose one over the other. Then when it comes to cost, KVM beats VMWare hands down. KVM is free and VMWare is like $1k to $2k per processor per year in subscription or something like that. In an economic slump, companies always look at the bottom to ensure they can survive the rainy days ahead.
Sun VM, hahaha, won a few battles, but still losing the war. M$ has had constant issues with their hypervisor, it's been on again/off again for years. They also licensed their source to XEN so they could build a better hypervisor. M$ just wants to sell Windows, so they don't stomp out competition outside the OS, anyone that can help sell windows licenses, and VMWare does plenty, is going to be just fine.
If you don't believe me check out Citrix. M$ has been doing the same thing as them for years and they are still a growing billion dollar company.
I think whatever you are smoking in your pipe dreams has gone to your brain buddy.
Sun VM, hahaha, won a few battles, but still losing the war. M$ has had constant issues with their hypervisor, it's been on again/off again for years. They also licensed their source to XEN so they could build a better hypervisor. M$ just wants to sell Windows, so they don't stomp out competition outside the OS, anyone that can help sell windows licenses, and VMWare does plenty, is going to be just fine.
If you don't believe me check out Citrix. M$ has been doing the same thing as them for years and they are still a growing billion dollar company.
I think whatever you are smoking in your pipe dreams has gone to your brain buddy.
http://virtualization.com/news/2008/07/08/emc-vmware-spinout/
Our take on Diane Greene?s departure:
http://virtualization.com/news/2008/07/08/diane-greene-vmware-paul-maritz/
Something else to consider: VMWare is seeing competition because the enterprise tool sets are, well... not cheap. At all. MSFT's Hyper-V is very liable to run up across the same problems. If Xen ever gets a decent tool set, and keeps it (and the tools) open-source, they stand to gain the best of all worlds. .
/P
You can use KVM to run VMWare image. There's no need to VMWare except for running on desktop and doing a bunch of installation and optimization. Then when you're done, you copy the image onto Linux KVM server and deploy to thousands of servers at no cost per processor cost.
I've done this. To say KVM otherwise is horsesheet.
These are only a couple of some very serious questions you're going to see when you try to sell KVM on an enterprise level. Until you can answer "yes" to them, and then say "even better than that" to each, you're liable to not get very far.
- by supersknews July 8, 2008 8:05 PM PDT
- As a layman, my understanding of VMWare?s triumph is just opposite to today?s cloud computing. Their core concept was to simulate a given hardware into multiple computing units. But here, cloud computing is more about integrating all given hardware to one giant computing unit. What is Martiz planning to do? VMnoWhere!!! ;-p
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(9 Comments)[Saurabh Kaushik]
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