Greene washed out of VMWare as revs undershoot

VMWare co-founder Diane Greene left the company today as it announced it would undershoot its full year revenue targets.

VMWare chairman Joe Tucci said in a statement that former Microsoft exec Paul Maritz would take the helm of the firm. Tucci also thanked Greene for her contributions and wished her “every success in the future”.

The firm bolted a paragraph onto the end of the statement explaining it would announce its Q2 results on July 22 and that: “While VMWare is not updating guidance for Q2, we expect revenues for the full year of 2008 to be modestly below the previous guidance of 50 per cent growth over 2007.”

We’ll stick our necks out and say this suggests the company may have met its Q2 targets, but not without a struggle, and has a bad, bad feeling about the next couple of quarters.

Significantly, Greene did not contribute to the statement, which suggests she has personally taken the fall for the guidance markdown.

Wall St clearly wasn't reassured by today's statement, VMWare’s shares were down by a quarter at time of writing to a shade under $40, a far cry from the $120 plus they were trading for last Autumn.

As for Maritz, he spent 14 years at Microsoft, leaving the firm in 2000. In 2004, he founded Pi Corp which focused on cloud computing solutions for personal information management. Pi was acquired by sometime VMWare parent EMC earlier this year, and Maritz became head of the firm’s Cloud Division. ®