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
