Welcome to the Blog, and a Word about VMware News

Today is the launch of the Mark-Sense blog. I hadn't planned to post more than a welcome, but interesting news bids me write on...

Today we learn that Diane Green has been ousted from VMware. As an admirer of VMware's performance, products and corporate culture, I wonder if this turn of events will have the impact many of us thought EMC's 2003 purchase may have had, but has so far been avoided.

Let's take a look at what Ms. Green has accomplished to date. VMware could have easily run aground years back had the company not gone out of its way to ensure a strong product quality profile. When virtualization is all you provide, and customer applications depend on your product's stability, there are no second and third chances, as Microsoft has enjoyed with its virtualization line.

While not exactly an Apple, VMware does share some qualities with the venerable silicon valley icon. They’ve exhibited strong product vision, delivered products that are intuitive to use and simpler than one expects, and cultivated a field organization focused on technical competence and the kind of integrity that makes for repeat customers.

The business results, of course, have been phenominal, with VMware typically cited as one of the fastest growing software companies ever, and enjoying business performance leadership within the technology industry as a whole.

Brava to Diane for one of the truly notable industry performances of the decade! I’ll miss her leadership of the firm, and as others have suggested, expect her to do well, wherever she takes on next.

As for the company's prospects, if Green replacement Paul Maritz has a solid sense of what brought the firm to this point, VMware should continue to do well, despite recent adjusted growth guidance and stock fluctuations. (After all, they were targeting 50% growth, and these are rough economic times…) I'll eat these words if I must, but I wouldn't be surprised if VMware ends up meeting its original targets when the year comes to an end... In any case, Paul has lead a small, visionary firm for a number of years himself, and time will tell if he's able to preserve what's made VMware so attractive to customers and investors over the years.

As a cautionary tale, consider the way in which HP fared in the Compaq merger. However well they’ve done longer-term, and in certain areas such as servers, for example, they should be congratulated, there’s no doubt that HP's corporate growth potential was hampered by aspects of the merger deal. Leadership and clashing culture played a key role, as some legacy HP assets went unappreciated including enterprise-level computing expertise in the field and successful product teams, while other assets were starved for savvy decision-making, such as the post-merger mid-range storage product line.

VMware has almost singlehandedly set the asset utilization, service level delivery and increasingly, operational efficiency standards for 21st Century computing environments. It’d be a boon to IT departments everywhere if EMC can keep what happened to HP from happening to VMware in the wake of Diane’s ouster.