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.”

If TNE status rests on revolutionary zeal, Ms Greene again comes up trumps. Analysts argue that VMware – akin to Google – has effectively created a new subsector of the technology industry. It specialises in virtualisation software, which allows one server – the intensively power-thirsty hardware used to store digital data – to run several types of operating systems at once.

Despite its novelty, VMware’s technology is used by every group in the Fortune 100. “It’s hard to find companies that aren’t clients,” Ms Greene says. Then there are her absurdly cool early years – surely worth bonus points in the race for TNE recognition. After attaining a degree in naval architecture at MIT, she went to work for a group that designed oilrigs. When told that, as a woman, she could not visit one of her creations in action, she quit to go wind-surfing in Hawaii.

Later, after taking a second degree in computing, came a treasure hunt to a sunken Spanish galleon off the Pacific island of Saipan. Three jobs with established technology companies and two start-ups later, she found herself leading VMware.

“I’ve always done things that completely engaged me,” she says. “This [VMware] is now the longest I’ve ever done one thing – and we’re building great products that are great for the world.”

The boast is not mere corporate puffery. Because VMware’s technology allows a single server to handle a workload that once would have required many, it cuts energy consumption by as much as a factor of ten. Servers, which accounted for about 2 per cent of power consumption in the United States last year – as much as television sets – are a key target in the battle against global warming.

“Look at it this way,” Ms Greene says. “The average server produces 12.5 tonnes of CO2 a year – that’s every server. A car produces about 3.5.”

Such green credentials are, for Vanity Fair, pure TNE gold – and yet, for all this, Ms Greene simply does not strike one as a TNE type. In terms of executive power, she ranks alongside Larry Ellison, of Oracle, and Steve Ballmer, of Microsoft. But her manner is unlike that of her combative, bombastic alpha male peers.

Trade magazines celebrate her “unassuming” manner. The San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily paper, has noted that Ms Greene always meets her guests at VMware headquarters in person – and how they often assume that she is a secretary who has been sent to show them in.

If anything, she gives the impression of not giving a fig for establishments, new, old or otherwise. “I’ve been very carefully trained,” she snipes at her public relations advisers and Wall Street’s reporting rules when she apologises for not being able to give a clear picture of VMware’s future growth. The company, expected by analysts to boost revenues of about $1.2 billion this year, up from about $220 million in 2004, is in a quiet period.

Asked about the attention that she has garnered from the media and Wall Street analysts, Ms Greene acknowledges that it has “taken some getting used to . . . learning to care deeply about sales and finances”.

Ms Greene, it becomes apparent, is an “engineer’s engineer” – a tag that she appreciates. It is not hard to see in her what Fortune called “a latent, nutty-professor element” when she enthuses over VMware’s next steps.

“We’re going to automate more, build in more efficiency,” she says. “On Monday we took the power-saving to another level,” she adds, before outlining VMware’s plans to sell more software to small businesses and consumers. Nevertheless, the overriding qualification for TNE membership is oodles of money and the desire to make piles more. It is, above all, a set where new money mixes with “newer money”, Vanity Fair says. Here, Ms Greene forfeits her claim.

She is more than comfortably off – “my husband and I are fairly successful,” she says – but the suspicion will always be that the couple missed out on billions by selling VMware to EMC, the database giant, in 2004 for about $625 million, which was a snip, given its subsequent performance. EMC still owns 87 per cent of VMware.

Nevertheless, Ms Greene contends that the sale was the right thing to do, because it transformed the lives of many VMware employees by letting them cash in their stakes in the business and it would have been “selfish” to have held out. Indeed, when Ms Greene is asked how much she made from the flotation of VMware, she sounds confused and says that she does not know. It is not entirely impossible that she does not really care.

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

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