February 9, 2007
A virtual software revolution
Diane Greene is probably the most important woman in Silicon Valley you never heard of. That is about to change.
VMware, the virtualisation software company she and husband Mendel Rosenblum set up in 1998, has been operating under the wing of EMC for the past four years. Its reemergence later this year through a proposed IPO (though EMC will keep 90 pc of the stock, at least for the time being) will probably put Ms Greene at the helm of one of the world’s ten biggest software companies, measured by market value. (Citigroup’s back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests an $8bn market cap, while Goldman comes up with more than $12bn.)
When she dropped by the FT’s office in San Francisco a while ago, Ms Greene showed she was nothing if not ambitious. This is her on the impact of virtualisation (which lets you carve up a single piece of hardware into a number of "virtual machines", or to spread a computing task seamlessly among a number of devices):
You can take storage arrays and server racks and routers and it all just becomes hardware. It’s an incredible point in time when the industry could fundamentally change… This is a chance to have a really open industry.
One implication of this: the virtualisation software (known as a hypervisor) would become a new, horizontal platform on which applications run, pushing the individual machine’s operating system down to a less significant position. That must go down like a lead balloon at Microsoft.
Ms Greene let on that Microsoft tried at one stage to buy her company but couldn’t agree terms, so it bought Connectix instead (Microsoft now has its own virtualisation product but, surprise, surprise, it only runs on Windows.) Fulfilling the real promise of virtualisation, says the VMware founder, will require technology standards that let any hypervisor run on any operating system.
This is yet another area, it seems, where Microsoft’s new committment to interoperability and open standards (see here and here) will be put to the test.
