Greene is the president of VMware, the biggest supplier of software feeding the hottest tech trend on the planet: virtualization. IDC says the market will more than triple in size by 2009, to $1.9 billion. Almost every vendor--server, storage, operating system, application, service--has some kind of virtualization play. VMware, which makes virtual machine and virtual hypervisor software, sits smack in the middle.
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![]() Tech talk is good, but trust is better when it comes to virtual software. Greene has bothand the vision. | |
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Greene holds a master's degree in computer science from Berkeley and one from MIT in "naval architecture." But it's not her tech chops that distinguish her. "Virtualization is the least disruptive of the disruptive technologies" is a favorite epigram, and she'll go on to explain how it can be implemented without turning the data center upside down. Greene's husband, Mendel Rosenblum, does the heavy tech lifting at VMware as chief scientist. Rosenblum is also an associate professor at Stanford University, where he researches operating systems and did the original deciphering of the x86 instruction set, the basis for VMware virtual machines.
But VMware didn't just mimic the x86 instruction set in software. Thanks in large part to Greene, it's surrounded a murky set of software functions with an aura of invincibility--a belief that you'll never get fired for implementing virtualization with VMware. Ahmed Mashaal, lead technical architect of UltraZoom Technologies, an FCC contractor, says VMware, unlike many other vendors, "is a trusted company. They built it step by step, not by hype."
Now comes the phase where VMware (which operates at arm's length from EMC) is the target. It's likely to get squeezed between Microsoft, seeking to compete with its own virtual machine and hypervisor software, and Xen, a cheaper open source offering. But there'll be no feints or sleights of hand, says Greene: "All we live, breathe, and think about is where can we take this virtualization trend."