Diane B. Greene and Mendel Rosenblum, co-founders of VMware, have been named recipients of the 2011 IEEE Computer Society Computer Entrepreneur Award, joining a who’s who of industry leaders who have been previously honored with the award.
Rosenblum and Greene helped found the Silicon Valley-based provider of virtualization and cloud computing infrastructure in 1998. It has since grown into a 9,000-employee publicly traded company that generates nearly US $3 billion in revenue per year.
The Computer Entrepreneur Award, established in 1982, is given to individuals whose entrepreneurial leadership is responsible for the growth of some segment of the computer industry. The efforts must have taken place more than 15 years previously, and the industry effects must be generally and openly visible.
Greene and Rosenblum were given the Entrepreneur Award “for creating a virtualization platform that profoundly revolutionized modern computing.”
Rosenblum is an associate professor in the computer science and electrical engineering departments at Stanford University. His research interests include system software, distributed systems, and computer architecture. He has published research in the area of disk storage management, computer simulation techniques, scalable operating system structure, virtualization computer security, and mobility.
As the chief scientist of VMware for the company’s first 10 years, he helped design and build virtualization technology for commodity computing platforms. Greene served as VMware’s CEO from 1998 to 2008, leading the company through an initial public offering and to a US $2-billion run rate.
Rosenblum is a 1992 recipient of the National Science Foundation's National Young Investigator award and a 1994 recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. He was a co-winner of the 1992 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and the 2002 ACM/SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award for creativity and innovation in operating systems research. In 2009, he was a co-winner of the ACM System Software Award.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and an ACM Fellow. He received a BA in mathematics from the University of Virginia (1984) and a MS (1989) and PhD (1992) in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley.
Greene holds degrees in mechanical engineering, naval architecture, and computer science from the University of Vermont, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California Berkeley, respectively. She serves on the boards of Intuit, MIT Corp., and the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST). She works actively with several private technology companies, and is on the Stanford School of Engineering Advisory Board.
Prior to VMware, Greene was also the founding CEO of VXtreme, which was sold to Microsoft in 1997 as the basis for their media player. Prior to that, she held engineering management and development positions at SGI, Tandem, and Sybase.
VMware delivers virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable IT organizations to energize businesses of all sizes. Its VMware vSphere platform helps customers reduce capital and operating expenses, improve agility, ensure business continuity, strengthen security, and go green. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world.
Among the previous winners of the Computer Society Entrepreneur Award are Hewlett-Packard co-founders William Hewlett and David Packard; Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Paul Allen; Apple Computer co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; Dell Computer founder Michael Dell; Intel’s Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Andrew Grove; and Bjarne Stroustrup, the father of C++. In 2008, Edwin E. Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios; and Adobe co-founders John E. Warnock and Charles M. Geschke; received the award in recognition of their accomplishments. Cisco Systems co-founders Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner were the winners of the IEEE Computer Society’s 2009 Computer Entrepreneur Award.