interviews VMware

Diane Greene’s Fireside Chat

Diane Greene will be speaking at Tuesday morning’s keynote at VMworld. A few weeks back, here’s what SKMurphy took home from Diane’s talk at TiE. At VMworld, she’ll be speaking about virtualization, but TiE is an entrepreneurial association, and so her remarks were more on building VMware the company (which, by the way, is a great place to work):

 

  • Users evangelize users, at several key points in its history, VMware has seen it’s growth hit a new take-off point because its users cared enough to make it happen. 6,000 users have signed up for VMworld.
  • Open communication keeps everyone on the same page (and moving forward): every Wednesday the company would buy lunch and have an open communication forum to cover recent events, plans, and allow employees to air concerns and issues.
  • If your technology isn’t evolving fast enough, give it away. In particular when you are in a deathmatch market with Microsoft, neutralize one of their common tactics of giving away technology by giving away your products that are not moving fast enough.
  • Continually invest in high quality IT infrastructure: it’s the basis for communication, coordination, and collaboration in any high technology firm.
  • Server Virtualization (consolidating many applications onto one server by leveraging virtualization technology) is more about cutting power consumption and saving floorspace than saving hardware cost. Power has  become the single largest component of the total cost of ownership of hardware.