Key VMware Executive Suddenly Resigns

VMware continues to have a rough year.First, VMware posted a lackluster Q4 2007 quarterly report Jan. 29 which caused the paper value of the company to drop a whopping $8 billion in a matter of hours in after-market trading.In June, super IT power Microsoft became a major competitor with its new Hyper V virtualization platform. Then, VMware lost its CEO, Diane Greene, in a sudden corporate shakeup by its parent company, EMC, on July 8. Shortly thereafter, its next quarterly financial report also wasn

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t quite up to expectations.Last month, VMware issued a warning to customers about the v3.5 update to its bread-and-butter ESX hypervisor that it could cause system disruptions due to virtual machines failing to power on.Now it has lost its director of research and development after a mere nine months on the job.VMware

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s Richard Sarwal announced his resignation from his $1.25 million-per-year job Sept. 2, saying he will return to Oracle. Sarwal had moved to VMware from Oracle in December 2007.Paul Maritz, the current VMware president and CEO, said in a perfunctory statement that

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we thank Richard for his service and we wish him well in the future. I expect to announce organizational changes to replace Richard in due course.

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VMware CTO and Senior Vice President of R

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D Stephen Herrod will assume day-to-day responsibilities for VMware

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s research and development organization until a new administrator is hired. Herrod has been with VMware since 2001.Maritz, who replaced Greene, previously was EMC

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s head of cloud computing. Before that, he was one of Microsoft

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s top executives.A call to Oracle this morning revealed that Sarwal is not yet on the company

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s telephone list. A call to VMware was not returned today.For more perspective, see John Hazard

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s blog,

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First Read.

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