VMware's founder Diane Greene interviewed

By The Guardian and CRN, not by me ;-)


CRN:

What are the types of companies VMware looks at in terms of being suitable for acquisitions?

Greene: Well, we look at technologies where there's an area we want to build, and there's some key technologies that might already be out there in a startup. So we acquire for that.

We've also acquired a company in Bulgaria that we've been outsourcing a lot of work to that has just incredibly talented engineers. So we just acquired the whole company for its engineering talent.

Or then there's the example of Dunes (Technologies), where it's process automation for virtualization. That was a solution that our customers wanted integrated in with our virtualization suite. So we bought the solution, because it had been built specifically for our virtualization suite.

The acquisitions have been going well, in terms of people come in and seem to really enjoy joining the company.

So building out the product suites is the major initiative. There are a lot of major releases over the next year that haven't been announced necessarily.

What are the most important things going forward in terms of VMware's direction?

Greene: Well, the hypervisor. We can add so much functionality, like new hardware functionality, security and resource management.

Guradian:

"So I was sitting at a table with a bunch of women from the media industry recently and they were asking 'so what do you do?'," says the 52-year old as she polishes off her morning coffee in an upmarket West End hotel. "And I tried 'we help people in the IT industry run their computers a lot more effectively and save them a lot of money', but that didn't work, they just asked, 'What do you mean, what do you do?' And so I mentioned 'virtualisation' and they said, 'Oh you mean like Second Life.'"

She gives me a look. "'No,' I said. 'What we do is basically plumbing but it is enormously valuable.'"

Just how valuable that "plumbing" is became obvious in August as VMware lived up to its moniker of "the new Google" because of its phenomenal growth and stock performance. By the time VMware's first set of results as a listed company were released back in October, the stock had tripled.

full inks: CRN and Guardian