Immediately after the replacement its CEO (the former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz took the place of Diane Greene), VMware risked to lose a number of high-profile executives and software engineers loyal to the fired co-founder.
The mass exodus never happened (also thanks to some aggressive workforce retaining programs) but VMware lost a bunch of key figures nonetheless:
- Paul Chan (Vice President of Product Development) in August
- Richard Sarwal (Executive Vice President of R&D) in September
- Mendel Rosenblum (Chief Scientist and co-founder) in September as well
Now a fourth important leader leaves the company: Nand Mulchandani, who became the CEO of OpenDNS, as reported by Computerworld and several other news sites.
This departure is especially concerning as it happens exactly now that VMware is seriously entering the security market.
The company will release its VMsafe APIs within VI 4.0, expected within the end of this year and the beginning of the next one, acquired a couple of security startups (Determina in August 2007 and Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008), entered the PCI Standard Council.
Mulchandani comes right from Determina, where he was the CEO.
Considering that virtualization has endless opportunities to revolutionize the world of security, his position at VMware as Senior Director of Security Products was critical.
But he basically said to Computerworld that the OpenDNS position was more interesting.
We’ll see who will replace Mulchandani at VMware.
Update: SearchSecurity.com reports that along with Mulchandani another key security expert, formerly employed at Determina, left VMware: Alexander Sotirov.