Greene washed out of VMWare as revs undershoot
MS veteran replaces co-founder
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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 $120 plus they were trading for last Autumn.
As for Maritz, he spent 14 years at Microsoft, leaving the firm in 2000. In 2004, he founded Pi Corp which focused on cloud computing solutions for personal information management. Pi was acquired by sometime VMWare parent EMC earlier this year, and Maritz became head of the firm’s Cloud Division. ®
COMMENTS
Fortunately ...
There are now open-source virtualisation alternatives, should VMware now abandon its former commitment to software that is both quite outstandingly good and operating-system neutral.
Hoping this won't happen, but if the new CEO brings the MS definition of quality with him, methinks those open-source alternatives will rapidly gain traction.
Donkeys!
Now it's possible to hate VMware just as easily as Oracle and M$. Kicking out a successful co-founder and one of the very few women leading a tech company just because sales will fall "modestly below" earlier predictions of 50 per cent growth is stupid.
Hope she comes back Steve Jobs-style (but maybe not the mock turtle-neck please) in a few years and lays waste to the people who forced her out.
Vaguely ironic?
MS releases WS2k7 with Hyper-V to manufacturing around the same time Ms Greene departs and Paul Maritz (ex-MS), now VMware CEO...
Market sentiment/impact: depends on what Paul M has to say as to which way the company will be going under his leadership. Early adopters are probably dead happy with VMware, from functionality and maybe 'its not MS' points of view...
Hyper-V arriving embeds virtualisation in the MS furniture... future suggests you get it anyway even it you may not want or need it. Added complexity may put some off it for now, re:support, but tools are always being developed.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1458
Interesting times ahead...
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