"Trouble" in the crazy stock market sense. They are not reaching "growth targets", which means she isn't pushing hard enough for growth. In reality she's probably a great boss, but just not cut out for running a public company owned by another company.
I'd feel bad for her, but I'm sure she has plenty of money. She apparently loves windsurfing, so they should just move back to Hawaii and have fun. Her picture looks like she's in her 50s, so she should just retire early and have lots of fun in the sun.
It's a recession, and a lot of companies are waiting on their capital improvements right now. This one surprises me in how impatient they're being, or there's something else going on.
VMware has been skimming the cream off the virtualization market and making enormous profit in the process, but that can't continue forever. Soon they must choose between sticking with the small but high-margin enterprise consolidation business and growing with lower margins.
Those are all desktop technologies. VMware make the majority of their revenue from dedicated virtualization servers, that connect to a shared SAN, and allow VMs to be moved from one physical server to another while running.
Their competitors are:
* Microsoft HyperV (missed inclusion inWin2K8, but available as a seperate download - can't move VMs without downtime). Management through MMC.
* RHEL Advanced Server (RHEL 5 with oVirt, a web based management tool, or Virtual Machine Manager, a shitty desktop based one. KVM/Xen is used as the engine, with a preference towards KVM. Not sure on moving VMs, know its planned but haven't payed with it much.
Yeah. Desktop virt for developers and QA is certainly visible.
Virtualized server farms, OTOH, are transparent. You could be logging into a VM and never know unless you ran dmidecode (Linux) or Get_WMIObject Vendor (Windows, IIRC).
That VM could also be moving from one physical machine to another while you're logged into it. You'd never know.
Last project I worked on was at a bank, with a few hundred VMs used to replicate the prod environment about 18 times. Project budget was $450M AU, about $400M US. VMware got a good chunk of that.
Best to call her the "co-founder." She's the non-technical head. The technical co-founder is her husband, Mendel Rosenblum, who created the first robust implementation of x86 virtualization.
Quite impressive that these two have been together so long without the business partnership or marriage falling apart.
I'm pretty sure people who know her from her UCB days (she was peripherally involved with Stonebraker's research) would say it's a mistake to call Diane "non-technical".
I suspect it bound them together actually. When a couple shares its labour it can become a important part of the relationship. Also, since they're husband and wife, I suspect that they combine their incomes, and so that partially deals with the money issue.
Even better - take a look at http://www.vmware.com/company/leadership.html. One of the co-founders, Edward Wang, "also helped to neutralize the infamous Internet Worm virus by discovering and describing one of its key mechanisms."
As a nice aside, when I was at a (British) college in about 1995, years before I got on the internet, I read about Robert Morris and the internet worm, and now I'm posting on a forum created by a good friend of his!
I find it interesting that I spent the first half of my life lusting after communications technology, and the second half getting to grips with it all and even contributing a little.
Wow. This going to come back to slap EMC in the face, just like what happened back with Moshe Yanai. It looks like the EMC management can't retain it's most valuable employees.
Nov. 2001: "Moshe Yanai, VP of engineering at EMC and the inventor of its Symmetrix flagship storage array, has received a cut of Symmetrix sales for over a decade. And they maintain that the arrangement has thwarted EMC’s ability to create new hardware for a tougher market. ... EMC denies rumors that Yanai is set to leave the company."
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=9644
Dec. 2001: "the chief engineer would no longer oversee the company's hardware division and, instead, would become an adviser to CEO Joseph Tucci. ... Yanai was pushed aside and really sidelined."
http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2001/12/24/newscol...
2002: "XIV is led by Moshe Yanai, one of the key architects of data storage systems and instrumental in the development of EMC's Symmetrix and DMX product lines throughout the 1990s." http://www.xivstorage.com/company/company_background.asp
http://www.economist.com/people/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11...