A week after VMware announced its top-priority Infrastructure-as-a-Service play, two more executives associated with de-emphasized technologies have left the company.
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger
Both execs, Javier Soltero and Kevin Henrickson joined VC company Redpoint Ventures as entrepreneurs in residence.
Soltero joined VMware by virtue of its acquisition of SpringSource in 2009 — after having joined SpringSource by virtue of that company’s acquisition of Hyperic. At VMware he was the CTO of SaaS and application services.
Henrickson was senior director of R&D for Zimbra, the open-source email product VMware acquired from Yahoo also in 2009. The dual departures were first reported by TechCrunch.
It was clear last year that VMware was scaling back on applications – which had been a key part of former CEO Paul Maritz’s strategy. It subsequently spun off the Java-based Spring framework along with Cloud Foundry and other assets to Pivotal where they will be part of that company’s universal PaaS push.
Selling off the non-essentials
It’s fairly clear that VMware would like to divest itself of Zimbra, which doesn’t fit into its new IaaS worldview, just as it sold off SlideRocket to Clearslide and Wavemaker Java technology to Pramati, both in March. (Pramati just announced Cloudjee a new company pushing a cloud development platform incorporating Wavemaker technology.)
Early this month, Patrick Chanezon, who led developer relationships for both Spring and Cloud Foundry efforts at VMware, joined Microsoft as director of enterprise evangelism.
We can’t say that VMware didn’t warn us. In January, CEO Pat Gelsinger clearly stated the company’s need to focus and eliminate distractions. At about that same time CTO Stephen Herrod left the company for General Catalyst. Oh, and by the way, Gelsinger will be on hand at Structure 2013 to discuss VMware’s IaaS plans.
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