Diane Greene

Diane Greene
Born	Diane B. Greene 1955-06-09June 9, 1955 (age 71) Annapolis, Maryland, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	University of Vermont (B.S., mechanical engineering, 1976) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.S., naval architecture, 1978) University of California, Berkeley (M.S., computer science, 1987)
Alma mater	University of Vermont
Occupation	Technology entrepreneur and executive
Years active	1976-present
Employer	VMware (1998-2008) Bebop (2012-2015) Google (2015-2019)
Title	Chief executive officer, VMware; CEO, Google Cloud
Term	1998-2008 (VMware) 2015-2019 (Google Cloud)
Successor	Paul Maritz (VMware) Thomas Kurian (Google Cloud)
Known for	Co-founder and CEO of VMware Commercialising x86 virtualization CEO of Google Cloud
Spouse	Mendel Rosenblum
Children	2

Diane B. Greene (born June 9, 1955) is an American technology entrepreneur and executive who co-founded VMware in 1998 and served as its chief executive officer until 2008. She later served as chief executive officer of Google Cloud from 2015 to 2019 and as a director of Google and Alphabet.

Greene trained as a naval architect and worked designing ocean-going vessels and offshore structures before moving into computing in her thirties. At VMware she led the commercialisation of x86 virtualization, the technology that allows a single physical server to run multiple isolated operating systems, which became the foundation of modern data centre architecture and a precondition for cloud computing. VMware was acquired by EMC in 2004 for $635 million and went public in 2007 at a valuation of $19.1 billion, the largest technology flotation of that year.

She was removed as chief executive of VMware by its board in July 2008. She subsequently co-founded the enterprise software startup Bebop, which Google acquired in 2015, and on completion of that transaction she was appointed to lead Google's enterprise cloud business, which she built into the company's first fully enterprise-capable business unit.

Greene was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2018 for contributions in transforming virtualization from a concept into an industry, and in 2020 she was elected chair of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology board of directors.

Early life and education

Childhood and sailing

Diane Greene was born on June 9, 1955, in Annapolis, Maryland, to an engineer and a teacher. She grew up sailing and crabbing on Chesapeake Bay, and competitive sailing was central to her early life.

At the age of 19 she ran the first Windsurfing World Championship, and in 1976 she won the national women's dinghy championship.

Engineering and computer science

Greene received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Vermont in 1976 and a master's degree in naval architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978.

She worked as a naval architect, designing ocean-going vessels and offshore structures, and ran engineering for Windsurfing International.

In 1987 she completed a second master's degree, in computer science, at the University of California, Berkeley. It was at Berkeley that she met Mendel Rosenblum, later her husband and a co-founder of VMware.

Career

Early technology career

After Berkeley, Greene worked as an engineer and manager at Sybase, Tandem Computers and Silicon Graphics.

She then co-founded and served as chief executive of VXtreme, a streaming video company. Microsoft acquired VXtreme for approximately $75 million, and its technology became the basis of Microsoft's media player.

VMware

Founding and technology

In 1998 Greene co-founded VMware with Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Edward Wang and Edouard Bugnion. Rosenblum, a Stanford University computer science professor, had led the academic research on virtual machine monitors on which the company was based; Greene served as chief executive.

Virtualization, the practice of running multiple operating systems on a single machine through a software layer that presents each with the appearance of dedicated hardware, had existed on mainframes since the 1960s but had been considered impractical on the x86 processor architecture that dominated commodity servers. The x86 instruction set contained instructions that could not be safely virtualized by the conventional trap-and-emulate method. VMware's technical achievement was to make it work through binary translation.

The company introduced the technology first on the desktop, as a means of running multiple operating systems side by side without rebooting, a product that found an immediate market among software developers and testers. It then brought virtualization to the server, where the commercial case was far larger: consolidating many underused physical servers onto fewer machines simplified system management, raised utilisation rates and reduced power consumption and data centre footprint.

Server virtualization became standard practice across enterprise computing. It also became a technical precondition for public cloud services, which depend on the ability to partition physical hardware among many tenants securely and efficiently.

EMC acquisition and flotation

In 2004 the storage company EMC Corporation acquired VMware for $635 million. Greene continued as chief executive, and VMware operated as a subsidiary retaining its own name, brand and products. Under that structure the business reached a $2 billion revenue run rate.

In August 2007 EMC floated a minority stake in VMware on the New York Stock Exchange. The offering valued the company at $19.1 billion and was the largest technology initial public offering of the year. The return on EMC's $635 million purchase three years earlier was among the most successful acquisitions of the period.

Departure

On July 8, 2008, the VMware board removed Greene as president and chief executive officer. She was replaced by Paul Maritz, a fourteen-year Microsoft veteran who had been running the cloud computing business at EMC. The board asked her to remain with the company in a significant role, and she declined.

The dismissal was abrupt and was reported at the time as reflecting tension between VMware's management and its majority owner over strategy and independence, and dissatisfaction on EMC's part with the pace of growth relative to expectations, notwithstanding the company's performance since the flotation. Greene's removal, and that of a founder who had built the category the company operated in, was widely discussed in Silicon Valley as an illustration of the position of founders under corporate ownership.

Greene has since spoken about founding and scaling VMware at Stanford University, at Y Combinator's Startup School and on the podcast series Masters of Scale hosted by the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

Google

Board membership

On January 12, 2012, Greene was appointed to the board of directors of Google, taking the tenth seat, which had previously been held by Arthur D. Levinson.

Bebop

Greene co-founded Bebop, an enterprise application development platform, and served as its chief executive. Google acquired the company in November 2015 for approximately $380 million.

Google Cloud

On completion of the Bebop acquisition in November 2015, Greene was named chief executive officer of Google Cloud, taking responsibility for a business that combined Google Cloud Platform, the G Suite productivity applications and the company's enterprise sales organisation.

Google's problem in the market was not technical capability. It operated one of the largest computing infrastructures in the world and had originated much of the underlying technology of modern distributed systems, including MapReduce and the container orchestration work that became Kubernetes. Its difficulty was commercial: it lacked the enterprise sales force, support organisation, contractual practices, compliance certifications and account management that corporate buyers required, in a market where Amazon Web Services had a substantial lead and Microsoft Azure could draw on decades of enterprise relationships.

Greene's principal contribution was to build that apparatus. She assembled an enterprise sales organisation, established support and professional services functions, pursued the certifications and regulatory approvals that large regulated customers require, and reorganised the disparate cloud efforts into a single unit. Google Cloud secured large customers during her tenure, and the company reported shortly after her departure that the cloud unit had reached $8 billion in annualised revenue.

The business nonetheless remained third in market share, and Google's cloud revenue was not disclosed separately for most of her tenure, which made independent assessment difficult.

Her period at Google also encompassed Project Maven, a contract to supply artificial intelligence technology to the United States Department of Defense for analysing drone footage, which prompted an internal employee protest and the resignation of a number of staff in 2018. Google announced that it would not renew the contract and published a set of principles governing its work on artificial intelligence.

Greene stepped down as chief executive of Google Cloud in January 2019 and was succeeded by Thomas Kurian, formerly of Oracle. She retained her seat on the Alphabet board until June 2019.

Board memberships

Greene has served as a director of Alphabet, Intuit, Khan Academy, SAP, Stripe, A.P. Moller-Maersk and Wix.com.

In 2020 she was elected chair of the board of directors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has also served as co-chair of the advisory board of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

Recognition

• 2007: Named one of America's 50 Most Powerful Women by Fortune
• 2011: IEEE Computer Society Computer Entrepreneur Award, with Mendel Rosenblum, for creating a virtualization platform
• 2013: Judge for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering
• 2017: Named to the Bloomberg 50
• 2017: Abie Award for Technical Leadership from the Anita Borg Institute, which described her as one of the most iconic technology leaders of the previous twenty years
• 2017: Honorary Doctor of Science, University of Vermont
• 2018: Named one of America's Top 50 Women in Tech by Forbes
• 2018: Elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions in transforming virtualization from a concept to an industry
• 2024: Honorary doctorate, Webb Institute

Assessment

Greene occupies an unusual position in the history of enterprise computing. VMware created a product category rather than competing within one, and the resulting technology became infrastructure so standard that it is largely invisible. The judgment that x86 virtualization was both technically achievable and commercially significant was contrarian when the company was founded, and the assessment of the National Academy of Engineering, that she transformed virtualization from a concept into an industry, reflects the scale of the consequence.

Her career is also frequently cited in discussion of the position of women in technology leadership. She founded and ran a company that reached a $19 billion valuation at a time when very few large technology companies had female chief executives, and she later ran one of the three major public cloud businesses.

Personal life

Greene met Mendel Rosenblum, a computer scientist and professor at Stanford University, while studying at Berkeley. They married and have two children, a son and a daughter, and live in Stanford, California.

She remains an experienced sailor and crabber, activities she took up growing up on Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.

External links

• VMware
• Google Cloud