Stories about: Maritz

Virtualization giant VMware has named Borland Software CEO Tod Nielsen to the newly created position of chief operating officer, in the latest chapter of a VMware management shakeup that began with the ouster in July 2008 of co-founder and CEO Diane Greene.

VMware is still the top player in the hypervisor market, but the coming year will see the company move far beyond its original focus of virtualizing x86 servers.

VMware has released VMware View 3, new software aimed at providing desktop virtualization, application virtualization and management of virtual desktops in one product.

Three months after being made VMware's CEO, Paul Maritz has announced changes at the company that are designed to help it ride out the economic storm while at the same time changing from a fast-growing startup into a mature software company.

Microsoft has been busy this year, rolling out Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in a push to expand its presence in the corporate data center. To be successful, the company must overcome an economic environment that appears increasingly difficult as well as tough competition from rivals Oracle and VMware, among others

VMware has taken a beating in the press and on Wall Street lately over its management upheaval, slower growth rate and competition from Microsoft, but customers at the VMworld conference here said they were either unaware of or unconcerned by the mounting pressure.

Paul Maritz became the president and CEO of VMware in July, after the EMC-owned company's board of directors fired co-founder and CEO Diane Greene. Maritz is now competing in the hot virtualization market against his former employer Microsoft, where he worked from 1986 to 2000 and led many of the company's major software initiatives. EMC executives put him in charge of VMware just a few months after EMC acquired Pi Corporation, a company Maritz founded. Maritz was in Las Vegas this week for VMware's annual VMworld conference, and sat down with Jon Brodkin to talk about company strategy.

VMware's CEO made his pitch on Tuesday for a new type of operating system for the data center, and in the process assigned the "traditional OS" to the dustbin of history.

VMware believes every business can be like a Google, and have a data center that is highly efficient and automated -- and eventually so completely virtualized it operates not as a collection of networked machines but as a living organism.

VMware, facing increased pressure from rivals Microsoft and Citrix Systems, will announce new products this week intended to let customers extend their use of virtualization beyond servers and into all corners of the data center, including storage and network equipment.

Former VMware CEO Diane Greene's husband, Mendel Rosenblum, has followed his wife out the door, announcing his resignation just days before VMware hosts an annual event to showcase its virtualization technology.