Summit Notebook
Exclusive outtakes from industry leaders
VMWare’s orator: Tod Nielsen
Tod Nielsen certainly has the gift of the gab. VMWare’s chief operating officer, who was once videotaped by a reporter in the hope that he would turn out someday to be “famous” (and a royalty generator), waxed lyrical at the Reuters Global Technology Summit about everything from British CIOs and magic crystals to PCs .
Here’s a sampling of his colorfully phrased — though occasionally puzzling — views.
On VMWare’s Q1 performance:
“We should walk down Wall Street and get the tickertape parade.”
On how the company has to keep up relationships with every hardware vendor out there:
“Part of my job is to be Switzerland and be great friends with everybody.”
On how VMWare triggers spending on storage, networking, servers and so on when they win contracts:
VMWare’s Diane Greene staying put
With one high-profile female Silicon Valley CEO swapping her executive office for a more political challenge, another — VMWare co-founder Diane Greene — says she’s sticking around.
I have built VMware. I am really excited about where we are going to be able to take this company and I am quite engaged in doing that. I am here for the foreseeable future.
I feel like we have been through several stages in VMware’s existence. Products-wise we are in a position now where every CIO appreciates what we do and knows that they can trust us, and puts us in a position where we have a pretty exciting future.
However, after running the show at VMWare since founding it a decade ago, its hard to avoid the comparison between Green and Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay.
Whitman stepped down this year, sticking to her mantra that any CEO in charge for more than 10 years has overstayed their usefulness.
Whitman has since been running her family’s foundation, and continues to be talked about as a possible candidate for anything from the California Governor’s seat to a higher office in Washington.
Not so for Greene. At the Reuters Technology Media and Telecoms Summit, she stated plainly…
…I am not planning to be Governor of California.
