Diane Greene, the chief executive of VMware, is-– on paper, at least – a prime candidate for membership of what Vanity Fair calls the The New Establishment (TNE). As the leader and co-founder of the hottest company in Silicon Valley, the 52-year-old belongs, surely, in that elite clique of mostly self-made media, technology and finance moguls that the magazine ranks in an annual league table of soaring influence, kudos and cachet.

Survey the evidence: since VMware made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange in August, its value has increased threefold. The company, which Ms Greene co-founded with her husband, a Stanford University computing professor, in 1998, is America’s third-most-valuable software maker. Worth more than $39 billion (£19 billion), it trails only Microsoft and Oracle, both of which are two decades older than VMware.

The IPO, which Ms Greene says was “a great event for the company . . . for the industry”, was the largest to emerge from Silicon Valley since Google went public in 2004. (Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Google founders, have become perennial top finishers in the Vanity Fair TNE league table.)

There is, moreover, a hint about the 1.57m (5ft 2in) Ms Greene of the audaciousness sported by many of the TNE elect, figures such as Steve Jobs and Steven Spielberg. VMware braved the roughest market in years to go public – and increased its target share price only days before the issue. “It crossed our minds that it was not the market situation that you’d traditionally look for,” she says. “It didn’t cross our minds not to float.”

...

Virtualisation reality

— The “virtulisation” process was developed 30 years ago by IBM as a way to partition mainframe computers

— After being adandoned in the 1980s and 1990s, when cheap servers became available, the process is being used increasingly by corporate and public-sector clients as a way of saving money and improving IT performance

— VMware launched its virtulisation software for everyday computer server systems in 1999

— It essentially allows a computer to run multiple operating systems and functions at the same time by virtualising the necessary hardware

— The company claims that most computers operate at only 10 to 15 per cent of their capacity, but virtualisation and running several systems at the same time increases capacity to about 85 per cent

Read the entire article from the Times Online, here.

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