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.