Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Good Management or Bad Management? EMC's Firing of VMware's CEO

Ashlee Vance has a great story in this morning's NY Times, dealing with Joe Tucci's firing of Diane Greene, the CEO of the virtualization pioneer VMware (publicly-traded, but majority-owned by EMC.)

Here's the opening:

    In the summer of 2007, Diane Greene was lauded as a business hero for leading VMware, a maker of business software, to the hottest stock debut since Google. But in the ensuing year, despite her popularity with employees and on Wall Street, her relationship with her directors, and especially VMware’s chairman, Joseph M. Tucci, grew increasingly chilly.

    On July 7, she found out just how cold it had become. After Ms. Greene made a special presentation to VMware’s board, Mr. Tucci, who heads VMware’s parent company, EMC, pulled her aside, according to people familiar with the events, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal company decisions.

    Inviting Mendel Rosenblum, Ms. Greene’s husband and the co-founder of VMware, into the room, Mr. Tucci told Ms. Greene she was fired, effective immediately. And he said the board wanted Mr. Rosenblum, VMware’s chief scientist, to take her seat on the board. Mr. Rosenblum declined the offer.

    When Ms. Greene’s firing was announced to investors the next morning, VMware’s shares plunged 24 percent, and the high-flying company was thrown into a tailspin from which it has yet to recover.


Check out this press release noting that VMware (before Greene's firing) had been named one of the Top 100 IT companies of 2008. EMC was also on the list, but much lower than VMware.

You could view this situation in one of three ways: either Greene was better-suited to leading an independent, fast-growth tech company, and wasn't working well with her corporate overlords...or EMC is not great at managing entrepreneurial folks who may sometimes have strategic disagreements (or personality clashes) with top leadership...or a little bit of both.

Either way, EMC (and Paul Maritz, the EMC exec who took over Greene's post) has a lot to do to prove that Greene's firing isn't a major setback for VMware. VMware's stock has been sagging since the firing, and its chief scientist, Mendel Rosenblum (yes, Greene's hubby), just quit to go back to academia. The head of product also left recently, too.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Desktone fills out the team

I'm out in San Diego this week for a conference, and I bumped into Paul Gaffney, the former CIO at Staples. Paul is now COO at Desktone, a start-up developing "virtual desktop" technology.

BBJ has a piece today about several executive hires at Desktone, which is funded by Highland Capital and Softbank.

The company is starting to look like a sequel of Softricity, a start-up acquired by Microsoft last year. Same CEO (Harry Ruda), same head of bizdev (Les Yetton). Plus, Jeff Fisher and Julian Weinstock.

One thing that's different: the VC backers.

Labels: , , , , , ,

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Seattle's F5 Networks Buys Lowell-based Acopia Networks

Acopia Networks has cashed out. Though the company was touting itself last year as a potential IPO candidate, an offer of $210 million in cash was apparently impossible to resist. (About $85 million had been invested in the company by VCs, including Charles River Ventures and Accel Partners.) Let's be generous and call this a three-bagger for the VCs involved.

The company virtualizes file-storage systems, making them sub-dividable and accessible from anywhere, as long as they're attached to a network. From eWeek's coverage of the acquisition:

    Acopia, which has about 100 customers, provides appliances that can virtualize heterogeneous network-attached storage devices and file servers. "Anything that serves files using [Common Internet File System] or [Network File System protocols] can be virtualized using file virtualization technology. We do for file systems and file storage what VMware does for servers: We federate existing infrastructure and create a single pool of resources that can be carved up, shared and moved to make provisioning changes or move data without disrupting users during the day," said Kirby Wadsworth, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Acopia, in Lowell, Mass.

Here's Hiawatha's coverage in the Globe.

Labels: , , , ,