Given that VMWare was in a quiet period prior to the release of its quarterly results, my conversation with Rosenblum was quite general. But he did share with me, among other things, the story of how VMWare got started and his outlook for virtualization in 2008. Here are excerpts from the interview:

How did VMWare get started?

I was a professor at Stanford University and we were building a supercomputer called the Flash Machine. I didn’t want to crunch numbers on this machine, but wanted to use virtualization to see if we could run commodity OSes on [it]. We could, and we wrote a paper about it, and that generated a lot of interest, including from Microsoft, who emailed us and wanted us to come and present to them in Redmond. My grad students who worked with me on the project thought we could commercialize the technology, and in 1998 we launched VMWare.

What was the plan when you launched it?

Clearly, the technology was going to be hard to commercialize, and we decided to focus on doing virtualization on the desktop. We worked on the technology and my wife took care of the business side of things.

Read the entire article and interview from GigaOM, here.