virtualization.info

Yesterday VMware announced that hired the founder and lead developer of Redis: Salvatore Sanfilippo.

Redis is an open source, journaled key-value data store.
By some degrees it can be considered a database server what can operate in two modes: it can keep its entire dataset in RAM and save it on disc asynchronously from time to time, or it can save every change in the dataset as it happens, using an append file.  

Redis is not yet fault tolerant. It should get clustering capabilities after version 2.0 is released.
It’s written in ANSI C and supported in a number of programming languages, including Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, C# and Java.

The announcement come from Derek Collison, hired in August 2009 as Software Architect for Cloud Services at VMware. Collison is a former Technical Director at Google, and before that he was Senior Vice President and Chief Architect at TIBCO Software.

VMware sees Redis as a key component for future cloud-oriented applications and cloud computing infrastructures, associating this move to the acquisitions of SpringSource (August 2009) and Zimbra (January 2010).
By hiring Sanfilippo, VMware is de facto funding the development of Redis.

At the end of January, the company’s CEO Paul Maritz explicitly declared its interest in middleware technologies, so VMware may act similarly with other projects that fits its new strategy to build a complete software stack.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

Somewhere in Q4 2009 VMware lost a significant amount of people in PR and AR departments.

The first one is Melinda Marks, former Senior PR Manager, who left the company in October 2009, after 6 years in VMware.

Marks was one of the key interfaces with the press world and one of the early developers of the VMware’s Global Customer Reference program.
She now has a role as Director of Communications at Qualys, the security vendor that also hired Robert Dell’Immagine, former Director of Community Program at VMware.

In the same period VMware also lost Amber Rowland, Group Manager of Exec and Global Communications.
Rowland is now a consultant for Unity Technologies, a startup focused on 3D and gaming.

The list goes on with Dawn Giusti and Bobbie Laccabue, both former Senior Analyst Relations Managers. Giusti just landed at NetApp, where she is a Senior Manager for Worldwide Analyst Relations.

While VMware continues to use external PR firms in US and Europe to deal with press, analysts and other influencers, it’s not clear yet who replaced these resources inside the company.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

One of the biggest assets VMware has, excluding of course its product portfolio, is its VMTN Forum facility, which hosts a large and incredibly active community of professionals that quite often are more knowledgeable, faster and way more efficient than the company’s paid support.

Any new customer that wants to learn VMware technologies inside out, well beyond what the official training class can provide, should consider investing at least 6-9 months just to follow the threads on the VMTN board in passive mode.

There’s a large number of VMware employees that contributed the success of VMTN. The first one that comes to mind for sure is John Troyer, Senior Social Media Strategist, who definitively is the VMware front man for everything related to the community.

Behind the scenes there’s at least another one: Robert Dell’Immagine, Director of Community Program, who just left VMware after almost six years.

Dell’Immagine joined the security vendor Qualys, where he’s covering the same role since February.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

Exactly one year ago, PHD Virtual Technologies (formerly PHD Technologies) lost its CEO Sridhar Murthy.

In the last twelve months the company was led by its Executive Chairman Joe Julian, former Senior Vice President of Americas Sales and Global Accounts at Veritas Software.

PHD Virtual Technologies yesterday announced that the former CEO of Shunra Software, Thomas Charlton, joined the company as new Chairman and CEO, thus replacing both Murthy and Julian.

This is the third CEO the company has since its launch in March 2006.

The most interesting thing is that the press release explicitly says that Charlton was chosen by Insight Venture, the VC firm that invests in both Shunra and PHD Virtual.

Labels: Leadership, PHD Virtual Technologies

Last week the virtualization security startup HyTrust announced its second round funding: $10.5M, led by Granite Ventures and Cisco.

The first round was equal to $5.5M, provided by Trident Capital and Epic Ventures.

Only Len Rand, Managing Director at Granite Ventures and former General Manager of Strategic Marketing and Global Alliances in Intel, will take a seat on the HyTrust Board of Director. Nobody from Cisco.

On top of this, HyTrust also announced that Jim Gannon, the former Director of Global Accounts at VMware, joined the company as its new Vice President of Sales.

Labels: Cisco, Funding, HyTrust, Leadership, Security, VMware

In July 2008, the VMware Board of Directors voted to remove the founder Diane Greene as CEO of the company. Greene was offered another position that she declined, leaving the company that she created and led through one of the most impressive IPO in the IT history.

Two months after her departure, his husband Mendel Rosenblum, left too.
Rosenblum co-founded VMware and was the Chief Scientist declining the company vision.

The board immediately replaced her with Paul Maritz, a long-time Microsoft executive that joined the EMC ecosystem after his startup Pi was acquired in February 2008.
Under the Maritz leadership VMware took an unexpected direction, extending beyond virtualization and cloud computing, to the realm of development frameworks and software-as-a-service applications.

Now Diane Greene is back on the IT scene, as TechTarget reports.
Greene appears as investor in a startup called Nicira, along with Andy Rachleff, Partner at Benchmark Capital.

Nicira, founded in early 2009, is in stealth mode at the moment but its website is clear about its mission to virtualize networks.
The company is managed by Steve Mullaney, who comes from Palo Alto Networks and Blue Coat Systems, where he was Vice President of Marketing.

That doesn’t mean that we’ll see Diane Greene leading another virtualization startup like she did with VMware, but it certainly means that Nicira may have some potential that may be worth to see in action.

Update: Nicira, formerly Nicira Networks, seems to be working on a “Network Operating System” or NOX.

A number of employees, along with Stanford and Deutsche Telecom researchers, in fact published a couple of research papers (one and two) about this topic in late 2009.

In the documents the team advocates the need for a centralized programmatic interface to observe and control large scale networks.
The NOX would provide such API while 3rd party vendors would build applications that leverage the API.

This suggests that Nicira may want to provide the NOX code as open source, playing a role as major contributor, while developing commercial applications on top of that.
This is a typical approach that has been proven successful in the virtualization market at least two times: with XenSource (maintaining Xen and selling XenServer), acquired by Citrix, and Qumranet (maintaining KVM and selling SolidICE), acquired by Red Hat.

A NOX-powered network relies on OpenFlow switches, a server running the NOX controller and a database:

Labels: Leadership, Nicira, VMware

Last month VMware lost Ganesh Mahabala, its Regional Director for India and SAARC region, CRN reports.

Mahabala has worked in VMware for almost three years and now has joined the system integrator Valuepoint Systems.

This is the third major change in the Indian executive team that virtualization.info reports.
In July 2009 VMware hired T. Srinivasan as its new Managing Director and in October 2009 Shrimathi Ambastha as its Director of Technology.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

This 2010 definitively started as the year to recruit talents.
After the news that Scott Lowe joined EMC, virtualization.info has just learned that Massimo Re Ferrè, is leaving IBM to join VMware.

Re Ferrè is one of the most popular professionals in the virtualization industry, leading the community since much before the launch of this publication (September 2003).
virtualization.info recognized his personal website as a top virtualization blog in 2008.

Re Ferrè worked in IBM for 15 years, most of them as IT Architect.
He will join VMware as Solutions Architect in the vCloud department in EMEA, working with other well-known talents (and bloggers) like Massimiliano Daneri, of VMBK fame, and Duncan Epping.

So while IBM is intensifying the competition with VMware, VMware recruits its best employees.
2010 is going to be an interesting year.

Labels: IBM, Leadership, VMware

While VMware continues its transformation from a virtualization vendor to a company that wants to compete with Microsoft, Google, IBM and soon Oracle, the massive replacement of its workforce, which virtualization.info documented in details for months, goes on.

Last week we covered the departure of Chris Hammans, Regional Director for UK and Ireland.
This one it’s the turn of Joanne Syben, Senior Director of R&D, in charge for ESX R&D.
Specifically she led the Core Storage team for ESX Server, including VMKernel components, FC and iSCSI. Syben componentized core storage stack to support native and 3rd party multipathing, policy and array specific modules. She also led the SMB team to work on scale-out-storage technologies (distributed systems, clustering, replication, LVM etc.)

Syben left in September 2009 to accept a role as Vice President Engineering in Intalio, a startup focused on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.

Syben came from GreenBorder, the application virtualization stealth startup that Google acquired in June 2007. The GreenBorder technology probably is under the hood of Google Chrome.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

VMware recently lost its Regional Director for UK and Ireland: Chris Hammans.

Hammans spent six years and a half at VMware and now moved to the virtualization startup Pano Logic as their EMEA Managing Director.

CRN informs that VMware replaced him with Mark Newton.

Newton previous positions include one at the distributor IBS and one in BMC, but most importantly he comes from Oracle, where he spent six years as Vice President of Sales.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

At the beginning of December 2009, Parallels lost one of its highest executives: Kurt Daniel, who was the Senior Vice President of the Online Business department and in charge for worldwide marketing, business development and corporate development.

Daniel spent five years at Parallels. He is now the COO of a Web 2.0 startup called WorkLight.

The press announcement released by his new employer and his LinkedIn profile, reveal some interesting information about the Parallels financial status: over $100M profitable annual revenue and over 1.5M customers worldwide.

Update: Parallels contacted virtualization.info and clarified that Daniel actually left the company in January 2009. His position wasn’t replaced but the company built a new marketing team over the year and hired Kerry McGowne as their new Vice President of Corporate Marketing.

McGowne was the VP of Corporate Marketing at ServiceSource before joining Parallels in September 2009, and before that he was the Director of Executive Communications and Director of Platform Strategy and Marketing at Microsoft.

Labels: Leadership, Parallels

As many virtualization.info already know (at least if you follow us on Twitter), the virtualization guru Scott Lowe has been just hired by EMC.

Lowe has been the National Technology Lead for Virtualization at ePlus Technology for almost four years.
But he also is one of the most popular virtualization expert in the industry thanks to his high quality blog (which virtualization.info named a top blog of 2008).

Lowe is also the author of the recently published book Mastering VMware vSphere 4, reviewed here.
Last but not least he has been a top speaker during the inaugural edition of the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress in Las Vegas last year.

Lowe will join EMC starting next week as Cisco-VMware Solutions Principal (which means he will focus on the VCE vBlock technology). He will work with Chad Sakac, the extremely popular Vice President of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC.

Labels: EMC, Leadership

InstallFree, the Israeli startup that entered the application virtualization market in April 2008 with a promising product, just lost its Vice President of Field Marketing David Karofsky.

Karofsky moved to its family business as President.

The InstallFree marketing department continues to be led by Jeanne Morain, the former VP of Marketing and Strategic Alliances at Thinstall.
Morain joined InstallFree in January 2009, after Thinstall was acquired by VMware.

Labels: InstallFree, Leadership

The founder and former CEO of PlateSpin (acquired by Novell in February 2008), Stephen Pollack, has just joined the Canadian firm VM6 Software as Board Advisor.

Pollack already sits in the Advisory Board of Embotics since November 2008 and Enomaly since December 2008, and recently joined the board of Kaviza too.

Labels: Leadership, VM6 Software

virtualization.info has learned that Ron Oglesby, Practice Executive, Global Infrastructure Consulting Services at Dell, left the company last week.

Oglesby is one of the most popular names in the virtualization industry, author of the bestsellers VMware ESX Server 2.5 Advanced Technical Guide and VMware Infrastructure 3 Advanced Technical Design Guide.
He was one of the premiere speakers at our Virtualization Congress 2009 and he appears on virtualization.info from time to time as guest columnist (see his last article here: Is there an optimal adoption curve for server virtualization?).

Rumors report Oglesby as the new Chief Solution Architect at Unidesk (still unconfirmed).

Unidesk is a US startup founded in December 2007, funded by Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture with a $8.1M Round A, and focused on VDI.
The company tried to launch a couple of times in the past two years (one in August 2008), and now their product, based on a patent-pending Composite Virtualization technology, is in private beta.

Labels: Dell, Leadership, Unidesk

During the summer Quest lost both founders of its Provision Networks subsidiary, as confirmed by CRN.

Paul Ghostine (former CEO) and Peter Ghostine (former CTO) sold Provision Networks to Quest in November 2007.
The leadership of the VDI division is now in the hands of Simon Pearce, who worked at Quest for 12 years as Vice Presidents in charge for the business in Western Europe.

Meanwhile the Ghostine brothers already founded a new company called cloudWORX where, according to their LinkedIn profiles, they keep the positions of CEO and CTO.
Easy to guess the company, still in stealth mode, is focused on cloud computing (not clear which architecture anyway, IaaS, PaaS or SaaS).

Provision Networks is one of the very few companies that virtualization.info rated as Outperforming in its Virtualization Industry Radar. Whatever these guys are going to do we’ll keep a close eye on it.

Labels: cloudWORX, Leadership, Quest

Over the last few months virtualization.info tracked a growing number of leaders that are leaving VMware and are being replaced by seasoned executives coming from Microsoft, Borland, Oracle, IBM and CA.
But the reality is that, despite our effort, the number of departures we tracked is just a fraction of the real number. We simply can’t keep up the pace at the current rate.

This silent turnover is now further accelerating and morphing into a massive re-organization.

A number of trusted sources informed virtualization.info that VMware recently laid off up to 40 people in the IT department and no less than 65 senior engineers in the Global Support Services (GSS).

Even before this, VMware fired or lost most of its people in the Analyst Relation (AR) and Press Relation (PR) teams, just two weeks before the VMworld 2009.
And this list includes people who heavily contributed to make the VMware brand so successful since the early days as a startup.

In the US, the company even replaced the Vice President and General Counsel Rashmi Garde. 
In India, the new Managing Director T Srinivasan, appointed in July, already called in a former colleague at Oracle: Shrimathi Ambastha, now working as the new Director of Technology.

There are probably many others we are not yet aware of.

Whatever is happening at VMware, it is taking on major proportions, and it may have a serious impact on the products that make the company a leader in the virtualization space.
For sure it’s having a serious impact on employee morale, which is reflected in the reviews appearing at Glassdoor.com (we already used this website to track the sentiment about the original CEO Diane Greene):

Going down a steep decline
Sr. Staff Engineer in Palo Alto

…

Management bloat. All brought on board in the last couple of years. This used to be a place run by engineers. These days, it's run by middle management. Most of them utterly incompetent. There used to be like 2 Product Managers for each product category. Now it's more like 20 of them. All of them egotistical maniacs, more interested in getting on their soap box and telling you what their vision of the world is than in working with you. Engineering managers are no exception. They seem to care more about their own well being than of the people below them. Things like process and protocol and often held in higher regard than the product itself.

Once was cool, now bloated management just like any other company -
VMware Anonymous (Current Employee) in Palo Alto 

…

One word: MANAGEMENT.
The people in the trenches are great, but like everyone else has mentioned, it's the management that makes you want to pull your hair out. In the Diane Greene days, management lines were clear and direct but since her departure there have been stacks and stacks of middle managers. The company has grown to be diamond-shaped: A few C-level guys on top, lots and lots and lots senior directors, directors, group managers, senior managers, and managers in the middle, and almost nobody at the bottom to execute. The people at the bottom are completely overworked and underpaid, while important decisions can't be made because of CYA middle managers who don't want to take any responsibility.
There has been a "hiring freeze" for the past 3 quarters, yet they have been stacking VPs and senior directors left and right. People who have left are not replaced, so guess what that does? Yup, more work for everyone else. And what happens to those people? They eventually leave too.
Egos and incompetency run wild with most middle and upper management. The fact is engineering and product development are the most important teams because they generate the products that make VMware great. Very few middle managers realize this and continue to push for useless programs with poorly developed infrastructure that ends up costing tons of money in the long run because of poor implementation and complete lack of vision.
Lines of communication are as clear as mud. Despite the glass offices and conference rooms (that Diane wanted as a symbol of transparency), it is very difficult to get information from one team to another because of lack of processes and workflow…

Mantra of Middle Managers... delegate delegate delegate the work.. take take take all the credit...
VMware Anonymous (Current Employee) in Palo Alto 

…you can have all the work delegated to you but your manager, your managers manager and your managers managers manager will take all the credit.. worse yet, they will show up to meetings you set up and grand stand, make you look stupid in front of your internal customers and disrupt the whole meeting.. because they can!
this would be ok if the middle managers were these incredibly smart and talented people frm whom you might learn something, but for the most part, you will find that you have more experience and are more seasoned than the person you work for.. this leads to a feeling that you have no mentor, no growth opportunity and no soul....
HR team- not sure what that group does.. we dont even have a set of core values that are evangelized.. its completely acceptable for the person higher up than you in the chain of command to treat you like you are nobody on a conference call and then turn around and kiss up to a a "senior director" in the same meeting...
what is this, feudal england??? guess I'm a serf...
if not for the engineers and the technology, this company would go down the drain and fast.. just my humble opinion.. I am just a serf after all.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

In mid-July virtualization.info unveiled that VMware was looking for a second CTO, who could take care of a desktop virtualization business unit that includes View, ThinApp, the Client Virtualization Platform (CVP), the new Virtual Profiles product OEM’ed from RTO Software, and more.

To cover this role VMware didn’t hire an external resource but promoted its Chief Data Center Architect, Scott Davis, co-founder and former President and CTO at Virtual Iron (acquired by Oracle in May).

Davis is in VMware since April 2007, but VMware formally presented him as CTO only at VMworld 2009.
This move should unload the growing responsibility of Steve Herrod, who leads the VMware technical effort since December 2001.

Labels: Leadership, VDI, VMware

For a few months now virtualization.info has reported how VMware is accelerating the replacement of its executives in almost every department and in every region where it is present.

The last news about this topic is about the research of a second CTO, dedicated to the application and desktop virtualization business unit, but apparently there’s much more than that.

During the last earnings call, the VMware CEO Paul Maritz announced a few new remarkable hires:

• Mark Egan, who was the Symantec CIO for 6 years.
  Egan is the new VMware CIO, replacing Tayloe Stansbury who left VMware for Intuit after one year and a half.
• Baliz Kadanish, who was the Vice President of R&D at Mercury (acquired by HP in 2006).
  Kadanish is now the VMware Senior R&D Manager in charge of the application level provisioning and management.
• Zahid Hussain, who was the Vice President of Engineering at Brocade for 5 years (left in 2008).
  Hussain is now the VMware Vice President of Engineering in charge of the vSphere development team.
• Derek Collison, who was a Technical Director at Google and before that the Senior Vice President and Chief Architect at TIBCO Software.
  Collison is now in the VMware CTO office, in charge of a project related to cloud computing, as TechCrunch reports.
  At Google Collison was working with Mark Lucovsky, the Director of Engineering that VMware hired last month, on the search APIs.
• Vadim Spivak, who was a Senior Software Engineer at Google, working with Lucovsky and Collison.
  Spivak is now a VMware Staff Engineer, as TechCrunch reports.

Additionally, CRN reported last week about a migration from the VMware parent company EMC and its subsidiary:

• Douglas Smith, who was the Senior Director of Business Development at EMC for almost 12 years.
  Smith is now the VMware Senior Director of Worldwide Partner Sales.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

Last week Vizioncore announced a couple of interesting changes around its executive team.

Jason Mattox is now appointed as Vice President of Support, while Tyler Jewell becomes the Vice President of Products.

Mattox is the co-founder of Vizioncore while Jewell is a long time Quest executive.

The latter joined the Vizioncore parent company in May 2005 and was the Senior Director in charge of  several business units inside Quest in the last four years.
His new position as Vice President of Products, Virtualization sounds like a major Quest take over on the Vizioncore product line and strategy, which operated as a fully independent subsidiary since its acquisition in January 2008.

The Jewell profile on LinkedIn reveals also another key information: Vizioncore made some investments in the cloud computing space.

I work on product planning and investment strategies for Quest corporate and as the VP, products for Vizioncore, a subsidiary.
Accountable for vFoglight, vRanger Pro, vConverter, vReplicator, vOptimizer Pro, vMigrator, vControl, Storage Horizon, SCOM MP, and some cloud investments.

Jewell has been responsible for the Quest merge & acquisition strategy so far at Quest, so it’s very lilkely that Quest has acquired some cloud startups that will incorporated into the Vizioncore product line over the near term.

Labels: Leadership, Vizioncore

virtualization.info keeps tracking the massive executive replacement that VMware is operating on a global scale, in almost every area, including the PR, the marketing and the sales department.

Last month we reported how a growing number of former Business Objects executives are joining VMware in the EMEA region after Maurizio Carli was hired as General Manager in this area in December 2008.
Before that we tracked the arrival of other high level executives from Microsoft, from Borland and from Oracle.

Another ex-Oracle joins the list today: Fred King, the former General Manager of Technology Alliances & Channels in the Australian & New Zealand region.

King joins VMware, after five years in Oracle, as its new Director of Partner Organization in the ANZ region, as CRN reports.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

Just yesterday virtualization.info reported how Citrix is reorganizing its application virtualization division by appointing a new CTO.

VMware is doing exactly the same: virtualization.info has learned from trusted sources that the company is looking for a new CTO just for the desktop division, to take care of View, ThinApp, the new remote desktop in co-development with Teradici, and probably the client hypervisor as well.
This new CTO won’t replace the well-known Steve Herrod but rather work side by side with him to lead the VDI and application virtualization effort.

By a coincidence, this morning TechCrunch reports that Mark Lucovsky, Director of Engineering at Google, left the search engine to take a job at VMware.

Lucovsky spent five years at Google. Before that he was a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, where he wrote most of the kernel executive, kernel32, and the Windows API for Windows NT.

Lucovsky spent 16 years in Microsoft and the new VMware CEO, Paul Maritz should know him pretty well (Maritz was one of the top executives at Microsoft from 1986 to 2000).
It’s not confirmed if Lucovsky is going to become the new VMware CTO for the desktop division but if there’s one that knows how to improve an application virtualization platform for Windows he’s the one.

Labels: Leadership, VDI, VMware

While much is changing at VMware, something big is changing at Citrix as well: the company hired a new Chief Technology Officer for its application virtualization division.

Harry Labana, who was a Vice President at Goldman Sachs for the last nine years.

To announces his new position Labana published two posts (one and two) on the Citrix corporate blogs, sharing some interesting views on how the product line will evolve:

…There is some really cool stuff coming with power management, so watch this space, and some future ideas that I hope we gain traction on. There are some advanced management ideas that we are thinking about and upcoming features that will help simplify your lives. HDX/ICA will continue to get better and you will see some new capabilities in very near term releases of the protocol…

For the ones that are wondering: Simon Crosby is still at his position as the CTO of the Virtualization & Management division.

Labels: Citrix, Leadership

The VMware executive replacement continues at fast pace since the replacement of Diane Greene with Paul Maritz as the company CEO.

A growing number of seasoned executives is joining the company from Microsoft, Borland, IBM and CA, and the replacement interests all departments, from the marketing to the public relations.

The last two new entries are taking their places in EMEA and in India.

The first one is Jean-Pierre Brulard, the new General Manager for the Southern Europe.
Brulard comes from SAP, where he has been the Senior Vice President of the Business Objects for EMEA for seven years.
Brulard joins another former Business Objects executive: Maurizio Carli, the new EMEA General Manager that was appointed in December 2008.
Carli and Brulard worked together at Business Objects from 2002 to 2007, when Carli was the Business Objects General Manager for EMEA.

The second one is T. Srinivasan, the new Managing Director of India and the SAARC region.
Srinivasan comes from Oracle where he has been Vice President for the India region for less than one year.
Before that has been Executive Director at HP for one year.

Update: As an anonymous suggested in the comments, VMware also hired Elie Kanaan, who comes from Business Objects as well. 
Kanaan was the Vice President of Marketing for EMEA and at VMware replaces Reza Malekzadeh (who left in May) in the same role.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

A couple of weeks ago, PRWeekus reported that VMware is changing its PR and communication structure.

First of all the company hired Aaron Feigin in May as the new Senior Director of Global Communications.
Feigin comes from Borland, where he has been Vice President of Corporate Communications for five years.
Feigin is not the first ex-Borland executive that joins VMware: in January the company hired Tod Nielsen, the former Borland CEO, as its new COO.

It seems that Feigin plans to make the VMware announcements less technical and more marketing oriented:

…he plans to revamp VMware's PR strategy by having the communications team work more closely with other departments and focus less on product features in its messages.

…

“We want VMware's story to be more in align with our customers' long-term goals”…

The second thing is that VMware is replacing its current PR agency, Fleishman Hillard, that lasted just six months after replacing the long-time partner OutCast Communications.

We’ll see if this will imply yet another change in the message at the big VMworld 2009 conference that will start at the end of August.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

Just two weeks ago MokaFive launched the second version of its enterprise solution, renamed Suite.

The company changed its strategy and executive team over the last three years and seems to lack a clear focus on how to deliver its vision.

Maybe the situation will improve in the coming future as they hired a new Vice President of Business Development: James Nicholas.

Nicholas comes from the venture capital world, where he was Director of Princeton Capital from 1996 to 2002 and Director of TriplePoint Capital from 2007 to February 2009.

Labels: Leadership, MokaFive

The new, much discussed Unified Computing System (UCS) is not here yet, but it’s clear that Cisco is very serious about becoming a major player in the virtualization and cloud computing space.

To further clarify its intention, the company announced that it just hired Christofer Hoff as the new Director of Cloud & Virtualization Solutions.

Hoff comes from Unisys were he was the Chief Security Architect, but he’s mostly known because of his tireless evangelism activity on his personal blog, declared a Top Virtualization Blog of 2008 by virtualization.info.
We had the pleasure to see him in action as speaker and panelist during the Virtualization Congress 2009 US, the virtualization.info’s independent conference about virtualization technologies.

Cisco has the appeal and the pockets to attract other major talents in the virtualization space, and build the dream team it needs to become a relevant and trusted vendor in a market that is so different from the networking one.

Labels: Cisco, Leadership

After securing its second round of funds in May, VKernel is ready to grow and attack the market with a more articulated sales structure.

To do so the startup hired a new Vice President of Product Management and Marketing: Kevin Conklin.

Conklin comes from Mazu Networks, acquired by Riverbed Technology, where he was VP of Marketing as well.

Labels: Leadership, VKernel

The list of executives that leave VMware gets longer and longer.
Maybe this is part of a plan defined by the new CEO Paul Maritz, who is hiring several experienced, old-school leaders from Microsoft, IBM, CA and Borland.
Or maybe this is the direct effect of the new culture that Maritz is spreading inside the company.
The result doesn’t change: VMware continues to replace its managers, and some of them are very high profile.

This time is the turn on the company CIO, Tayloe Stansbury, who left VMware this month to join Intuit as their CTO.
Stansbury has been in VMware for one year and a half, during which helped to clarify how VMware is using its own products internally.
VMware also lost Reza Malekzadeh, its former Sr. Director, Products & Marketing for EMEA.
Among other things, Malekzadeh is the man behind the organization of VMworld Europe 2008 and 2009.

The two executives joins the following (and probably many others that virtualization.info couldn’t track):

• June 2008 - Diane Greene, co-founder, President and CEO (?)
• August 2008 - Paul Chan, Vice President of Product Development (on sabbatical)
• September 2008 - Richard Sarwal, Executive Vice President of R&D (back to Oracle)
• September 2008 - Mendel Rosenblum, co-founder and Chief Scientist (back to Stanford University)
• November 2008 - Nand Mulchandani, Senior Director of Security Products (now at OpenDNS)
• April 2009 - Karthik Rau, Vice President of Product Management and Worldwide Marketing (on sabbatical)

Labels: Leadership, VMware

One week ago virtualization.info broke the news about the departure of Karthik Rau, Vice President of Product Management and Worldwide Marketing, and a key member of the original leadership team that led VMware in the early days.

An anonymous source sent us a tip on that news suggesting to double-check the employment status of some key members of the View (formerly Virtual Desktop Manager or VDM) team, arrived at VMware after the 2007 acquisition of Propero.

Two of them left the company to start a consulting firm:

• Steve Peskin - Senior Director of VDI OEM Alliances
• Tommy Armstrong - Senior Product Marketing Manager for VDM/View and ThinApp

A third member of the original Propero team left VMware immediately after the acquisition and now joined again his former colleagues: Steve Roberts, Business Development at Propero.

One of their profiles is specially interesting as it reveals the price that VMware paid in 2007 to have Propero: $25 million.
At that time the terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Labels: Leadership, VDI, VMware

Despite its low profile (which is maintained on purpose) Veeam is getting bigger and bigger.

In 2008 virtualization.info already reported on its healthy growth in US and its expansion in Europe, all without venture capital money.

Now Veeam just hired a CFO, William H. Largent, who comes from Applied Innvation, a public company that he led as CEO.

This may mean nothing in particular but may also mean that Veeam is getting ready to make some large acquisitions or to get acquired for a big amount of money.

Labels: Leadership, Veeam

After the sack of Diane Greene, the VMware co-founder and CEO, in July 2008 many suspected a mass departure of loyal engineers and executives.

As far as we know such exodus never happened but for sure the company lost some key people in the leadership team:

• August 2008 - Paul Chan, Vice President of Product Development (on sabbatical)
• September 2008 - Richard Sarwal, Executive Vice President of R&D (back to Oracle)
• September 2008 - Mendel Rosenblum, co-founder and Chief Scientist (back to Stanford University)
• November 2008 - Nand Mulchandani, Senior Director of Security Products (now at OpenDNS)

Recently this list just got a little longer as Karthik Rau, one of the most popular public faces of VMware, left the company in January 2009.

Rau was the Vice President of Product Management and Worldwide Marketing at VMware, and his LinkedIn profile currently lists him as unemployed, on sabbatical.

As virtualization.info highlighted several times it seems that for each VMware executive that leaves a Microsoft (or equivalent huge vendor) executive gets hired.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

It may be just an impression but the number of old-school executives that are populating the VMware ranks is rapidly increasing.

Everything started in August 2008 when the company board fired the founder and CEO Diane Greene and replaced her with Paul Maritz, for many years one of the most important executives in Microsoft after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.

After that, VMware started to hire executives that worked in Microsoft (Tod Nielsen, now employed as COO), IBM (Maurizio Carli, now employed as General Manager EMEA) and CA, (Andrew Dutton, now employed as General Manager APAC) .

Yesterday the company hired yet another Microsoft former executive: Richard McAniff.

McAniff was the Vice President for Microsoft Office and now is the new Chief Development Officer.
He takes the seat of Richard Sarwal, the former Executive Vice President of R&D, that went back to Oracle after just one year at VMware.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

In January 2008 a new startup entered the Virtual Lab Automation market segment: StackSafe (see virtualization.info coverage here).

The company was founded in 2005 with the former name of Revive Systems. It took three years to develop and launch a Xen-based solution to compete against VMware, Surgient, VMLogix and the other VLA companies that arrived later (like Skytap).

A little more than a year ago StackSafe showed a solid leadership team with a strong background on security, as some of the executives were coming from Symantec and Counter Pane.
Now the Board of Directors page only lists the CEO, Loren Burnett, along with the startup funders: Roger Novak, of Novak Biddle Venture Partners and Matthew McCooe, of Chart Venture Partners.

In over twelve months (or over four years, depending on they way you count) the company didn’t impress much for its activity and the virtualization community is barely aware of its Test Center product.
Maybe the funders are looking for a leadership replacement?

Update: It seems that StackSafe planned to raise a Series B funding of $10 Million in 2008 (half of them would be provided by the current investors) but couldn’t succeed.
This may imply that the company is simply running out of money.

Labels: Leadership, StackSafe, Virtual Lab Automation

In November 2008 Reflex Systems (formerly known as Reflex Security) completely changed its focus on virtualization, moving from security to management, and its market strategy.

To sell the new product, Virtualization Management Center (VMC), they also need a new Vice President of Sales: Preston Futrell.

Futrell was the Director of Services Sales in ISS before the security firm was acquired by IBM in 2006.

Maybe Reflex Systems decided for Futrell in the hope that his credibility in the security world will provide a last chance to sell the Virtual Security Appliance (VSA).

Labels: Leadership, Reflex Systems

Just last month Neocleus hired the former President of Product Management & Marketing at Softricity, Bill Corrigan.
This month instead the company appoints an RSA executive to its Board of Directors: Dennis Hoffman.

Hoffman is the Vice President and General Manager of Data Security at RSA, which is a subsidiary of EMC.

The strong background in security is not really a surprise: the startup leadership comes from well-known security firms like BeeFence, Check Point, Entercept (acquired by McAfee), SofaWare.

Nonetheless this subtle link with EMC is interesting.
Neocleus is about to release its client hypervisor based on Xen (probably beating on time Citrix, VMware, and a number of other startups).
One may think that they are trying to attract the attention of VMware (which is another EMC subsidiary) but EMC swore endless times that its subsidiaries are totally independent and don’t receive any pressure from the parent company. It’s just a matter to believe so.

Labels: Leadership, Neocleus

VMware continues to reshape its leadership outside North America, choosing key figures with a certain background and culture.

In December 2008 the company appointed its new General Manager for EMEA, Maurizio Carli, who opened the VMworld Europe 2009.
Carl was the Managing Director of the Enterprise division at Google EMEA, but more importantly he was, for a long time, Vice President of the EMEA Software Group at IBM.

Yesterday the company appointed the new General Manager for APAC: Andrew Dutton.

Dutton comes from Computer Associates where he was Senior Vice President and General Manager of International Business.
Before CA, Dutton covered positions at BEA System, IBM and Visa.

If there’s a path here, it seems that the new CEO Paul Maritz, the former top executive at Microsoft, is bringing inside VMware all the knowledge needed to compete with the big four infrastructure management behemoths.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

The startup Pano Logic continues to extend its executive team with experienced leaders in the IT industry.

The first one was John Kish, the former President and CEO of Wyse Technologies, that joined the company in October 2008 for the same role.

Then, in February 2009, Pano Logic secured Brian Cox, the former Vice President of Sales Operations at EqualLogic, that covered the role of Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations.
Before his job at EqualLogic, Cox was the Vice President of Worldwide Sales Strategy and Field Programs at VMware.

And now the company hires Jeffrey Page, the former Vice President of Finance and Operations at Firetide, a provider of multi-service mesh networks for industrial and municipal applications.
Before that job, Page was the Director of Sales at Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications.

Labels: Leadership, Pano Logic

The young application virtualization startup InstallFree (launched in April 2008) must be really interesting if it was able to hire away a former Thinstall executive from VMware and a former Kidaro executive from Microsoft.

The first one is Jean Morain, who served as Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Alliances at Thinstall before the VMware acquisition in January 2008.
Prior to Thinstall, Morain was at BMC Software, Inc., where she was senior manager of the Configuration Automation Products Group.
Morain will cover the role of Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Alliances at InstallFree.

The second one is Carl M. Wright, who served as Vice President, Sales and Corporate Strategy at Kidaro before the Microsoft acquisition in April 2008.
Wright previously held executive roles at Decru (purchased by NTAP) and Securify (purchased by SCUR), and served as Chief Information Security Officer for the U.S. Marine Corps.
Wright will cover the role of Senior Vice President of Sales at InstallFree.

The reason why InstallFree needs both Thinstall and Kidaro executives expertise is that the startup is trying to play two games at the same time.
On one side it’s offering a remarkable application virtualization product that really shines against some more popular competitors.
On another side it’s trying to leverage its approach to application virtualization in a way that the engine could offer the same capabilities currently offered by security wrappers like the former Kidaro Managed Workspaces:

Labels: InstallFree, Leadership, Microsoft, VMware

The US startup Neocleus is getting ready to expose its client hypervisor to the largest part of the market, as it’s finally spending some of its $16.4M (the Series B round happened in June 2008) to build a marketing and sales infrastructure.

The first executive joining the company is Bill Corrigan, as Chief Marketing Officer.

Corrigan was the Vice President of Product Management & Marketing in Softricity before the Microsoft acquisition, and once in Redmond he was Director of Product Management in the Windows and Enterprise Management Division.

Labels: Leadership, Neocleus

PHD Technologies continues to renew itself: in August 2008 the company secured an undisclosed sum that is using to acquire technologies and competency as well as to rebuild its leadership.
After appointing Sridhar Murthy as CEO and Igor Saulsky as Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales, now the company appoints Joe Julian as member of the Board of Directors:

Julian formerly worked as Senior Vice President of Americas Sales and Global Accounts for Veritas Software. In this role, Julian managed the sales, pre-sales, and support renewal operations for all products in the United States, Canada, and Latin America. In addition, he was responsible for the launch of Veritas' Global Accounts Program, which included 20 global accounts worldwide and the National Accounts program in the United States. Julian also served as an active board member and strategic consultant to Avamar Technologies, leading up to Avamar's acquisition by EMC in 2006.

Interestingly enough, PHD Technologies reports Julian as involved with the Board of Directors of Virtual Iron. It must be a previous job as the current composition doesn’t include him.
In any case, PHD Technologies is already teasing at a future support for Virtual Iron.

After the acquisition of Xtravirt’s software, this is another good achievement for the company, but not enough yet to confirm that it’s moving away from the typical early stage where the founder covers multiple roles, from the engineer to the web designer, passing through the CEO.

The corporate image, in fact, is still a mess, divided between two brands: PHD Consulting and esXpress, the flagship product.
Every query to PHD Technologies directs to esXpress, where the PHD Technologies brand is barely mentioned. Then, an “About PHD” page redirects to PHD Consulting.

Besides a generic address, a phone number and an email contact, there’s no way to obtain structured information about the company profile, its leadership and its operations.

Exactly one year ago the company claimed to have over 1,000 customers, but the only support facility available seems to be a web forum.

With these elements it’s impossible to say how healthy PHD Technologies is, but certainly the new leadership should consider the idea to clarify where the company is today and where it’s going.

Labels: Leadership, PHD Technologies

VMware starts the new year hiring away the Borland CEO Tod Nielsen.

Prior to Borland, Nielsen served as senior vice president, marketing and global sales support for Oracle Corporation. Prior to Oracle, Nielsen was the chief marketing officer and executive vice president of engineering at BEA Systems, where he had overall responsibility for BEA’s worldwide marketing strategy and operations, as well as all research and development operations. Nielsen joined BEA after the acquisition of his private company, Crossgain Inc., where he served as its chief executive officer.

Anyway the most interesting news is that Nielsen worked for twelve years at Microsoft where he possibly met Paul Maritz, the new VMware CEO.

Nielsen, who will work as COO and will report directly to Maritz, is the second Microsoft executive that VMware hires.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

Yesterday VMware announced a major change for its European business: Maurizio Carli was hired as General Manager of the EMEA region.
This implies the responsibility of the strategic planning, business operations and management of sales, channels, services and marketing.

Carli come from Google, where he was the Managing Director of the Enterprise division for EMEA.
Before that Carli was Senior Vice President and General Manager for EMEA at Business Object and even before he was Vice President of the EMEA Software Group at IBM.

We’ll see if the “Don’t be evil” philosophy that Carli adopted at Google will help VMware in improving the relationship with its European channel partners, which is not always idyllic, and stay ahead of the competition against Citrix and Microsoft.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

The startup MokaFive loses its CEO, Bill Demas, after just one year of work.

Demas took the position in July 2007, in concurrence with the second round of financing secured by the company.
Under his management MokaFive changed name (it was formerly known as moka5) and strategy, shifting its focus from the consumers to the enterprises.

Demas left in August to join Turn, an advertising company.
He has been replaced by a top figure in the IT industry: Dale Fuller.

Fuller served as interim CEO at McAfee for 1,5 years, as CEO at Borland, as Vice President of Macbook division at Apple.
Additionally Fuller is in the board of directors of AVG, one of the most popular anti-virus engine around, and covered the same role in Phoenix Technologies.

After all MokaFive doesn’t seem to have lost its consumer vendor identity, and the appointment of Dale Fuller seems to confirm this.

Labels: Leadership, MokaFive

The startup Virtual Computer is completing the last steps to officially enter the market.

Last week its hybrid VDI solution, NxTop, moved to private beta, and now the company appoints its Vice President of Sales: Sandrijn Stead.

Prior to joining Virtual Computer Inc., Sandrijn served as executive vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Reflex Security Ltd (now Reflex Systems). As the first employee for Reflex Security in the EMEA region, Sandrijn built the global sales, technical and marketing teams and created a stable channel across the globe, including 300 VARs and 16 distributors.

Labels: Leadership, Virtual Computer

Virtual Iron finally found a replacement for Mike Grandinetti, former Chief Marketing Officer, who left the company in May.

Susan Roberts replaces him as Senior Director of Marketing.
She comes from Dassault Systems where she was Director of Global Branding and Marketing Communications and Paxonix where she was Director of Marketing.

She holds a U. S. Patent (pending) for interactive consumer instruction and her work has been recognized by numerous regional and national award committees including the prestigious Clio Award for Best Interactive Television Service, as well as the Business Marketing Association Silver Award for achievements in database marketing and  the Colorado Governor’s Award for Excellence in Exporting.

Labels: Leadership, Virtual Iron

Stephen Pollack, the founder and former CEO of PlateSpin (acquired by Novell in February) seems more busy now than when he was leading his own company.

Just two weeks ago Embotics, the Canadian startup focused on the VM lifecycle management area, announced the appointment of the successful entrepreneur as Advisor.
Now Enomaly, another Canadian company strongly refocusing on cloud computing, is doing the same.

Immediately after Pollack joined Embotics the company raised $4 million in a Series B funding.
We’ll wait to see what wonderful things will happen to Enomaly.

Labels: Enomaly, Leadership

In September 2007 VMware acquired one of the few companies busy in the virtual infrastructure orchestration market: Dunes Technologies.

After more than one year, the company has yet to unveil how Dunes products will be integrated into VMware Infrastructure, but at least we now know where a part of the knowledge is going: Dan Mitchell, former Technical Director of Dunes left VMware to join the startup DynamicOps in June 2008 (see virtualization.info coverage here). 

DynamicOps is busy in the VM lifecycle management segment and Mitchell certainly has some experience to share because of the powerful VS-O orchestration framework that Dunes developed in the last five years.

Labels: DynamicOps, Leadership

Immediately after the replacement its CEO (the former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz took the place of Diane Greene), VMware risked to lose a number of high-profile executives and software engineers loyal to the fired co-founder.

The mass exodus never happened (also thanks to some aggressive workforce retaining programs) but VMware lost a bunch of key figures nonetheless:

• Paul Chan (Vice President of Product Development) in August
• Richard Sarwal (Executive Vice President of R&D) in September
• Mendel Rosenblum (Chief Scientist and co-founder) in September as well

Now a fourth important leader leaves the company: Nand Mulchandani, who became the CEO of OpenDNS, as reported by Computerworld and several other news sites.

This departure is especially concerning as it happens exactly now that VMware is seriously entering the security market.
The company will release its VMsafe APIs within VI 4.0, expected within the end of this year and the beginning of the next one, acquired a couple of security startups (Determina in August 2007 and Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008), entered the PCI Standard Council.

Mulchandani comes right from Determina, where he was the CEO.
Considering that virtualization has endless opportunities to revolutionize the world of security, his position at VMware as Senior Director of Security Products was critical.
But he basically said to Computerworld that the OpenDNS position was more interesting.

We’ll see who will replace Mulchandani at VMware.

Update: SearchSecurity.com reports that along with Mulchandani another key security expert, formerly employed at Determina, left VMware: Alexander Sotirov.

Labels: Leadership, VMware