Former VMware Founder Greene Heads Virtualized Storage Startup

Diane Greene, who co-founded VMware (VMW) in 1998 and was unceremoniously dumped as chief executive in 2008, has emerged as the leadership—and perhaps the money—behind a Silicon Valley-based virtualized storage company just now coming out of stealth mode called Datrium Storage. Datrium’s target customers are said to be cloud and service providers.

According to reports, Datrium is targeting storage giant EMC (EMC), whose chief executive, Joe Tucci, is said to have engineered Greene’s exit from VMware some five years after the storage giant bought VMware in 2003, and replaced her with Paul Maritz, who now helms Big Data cloud spinoff Pivotal. Greene was blamed for VMware’s declining stock value and missed revenue targets.

In a further irony, Datrium has been gobbling up VMware talent, according to reports, most notably Mike Nelson, a former VMotion engineer; Bogomil Balkansky, a former cloud infrastructure senior vice president; Matt Ginzton, a former senior staff engineer; and Patrick Lin, a former senior product manager.

Greene is a storied figure in Silicon Valley lore, holding high-level technical positions at Silicon Graphics (SGI), Sybase and Tandem as well as serving as VXtreme chief executive before co-founding VMware. She is a board member at Intuit (INTU) and gained a seat on Google’s (GOOG) board a year ago January. She is an active investor, providing backing to Cloudera, CloudPhysics, Cumulus Networks, Nicira, Nimbula, Pure Storage, Rockmelt, Typesafe and Unity Technologies.

Greene rumors have been floating around the Valley for a while, gaining steam last month when she commented on her investment in software-defined networking startup Cumulus by saying she needed a switch and a scalable data center for her own new project.

In May, Greene, from her perch on Google’s board, called for more engineers to help solve the world’s problems in areas such as energy, health and nutrition, as recounted here.

“The heroes of the world haven’t tended to be the engineers,” she said. “People look to the mass media to see who is important in the world and I think it’s great to see more technical people and to understand the importance of what they are doing. This lets younger people relate to them and see that they too can have a big impact through STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).”