The battle for bright minds between virtualization vendors is not just at R&D and Sales levels. Obviously the most critical positions to change the political influence over the market is at the executive level and VMware is doing all the best to gain some strategic advantages.
Despite no press announcements were released, an uncommon fact for such big tech companies, between December 2007 and now VMware hired two top executives away from two top competitors. In details:
- Former Senior Vice President of System Management at Oracle, Richard Sarwal, left the company (after almost 19 years) to become the VMware Executive Vice President of Research & Development
- Former Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix, Kate Hutchinson, left the company to cover the same role at VMware
It doesn’t seem a case that both Oracle and Citrix are threatening VMware from different angles.