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Leostream Puts Jack Hembrough In Charge Of Sales and Marketing

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Leostream, the young hosted desktop connection broker that recently announced it had raised $3 million in Series A funding, today announced it has appointed Jack Hembrough to the position of Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Hembrough has spent over 20 years in the hardware and software business, creating successful start-ups and running profitable businesses.

Hembrough comes to Leostream from Application Security, a venture-backed software security company, where he served from its inception as President, CEO, and later as Chairman of the Board, growing the company to over $20 million in annual sales.
Prior to joining Application Security, Hembrough was Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales for Authentica, and as the fourteenth employee at Raptor systems, Hembrough was part of a highly successful IPO, subsequently leading Raptor’s expansion as Vice President and General Manager of the European operation, based in Amsterdam.
Additionally, he has held senior executive positions in sales and management at Information Resource Engineering (now SafeNet), and Motorola Corporation.
[Source: MarketWatch]

VMware Formally Releases ThinApp 4.0 Into The Wild

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Only a few days later than anticipated, VMware has released ThinApp 4.0, its first application virtualization solution (formerly called Project North Star) after snapping up Thinstall earlier this year.

ThinApp 4.0 (build 2200) is the next major release of the former Thinstall solution called Application Virtualization Suite 3.2, and has certain new features, such as:

  • Application Sync: enables you to deploy application updates. Application Sync automatically checks for and installs updates to your packaged applications. Updates might include changes such as a new version, service pack updates, or configuration changes in the package.ini file
  • Application Link: connects deployed applications. For example, you can establish a relationship between a deployed instance of Microsoft Office 2003 and a new Microsoft Office plug-in. Application Link enables you to establish a link between applications without having to encapsulate them into the same executable package

A trial download is available here.

ThinApp comes bundled with VMware Workstation under the name ThinApp Suite. The company offers a starting package for 50 concurrent clients at $6,050 (including a 12×5 Gold Support yearly subscription), with additional clients starting at $47.19 (including a 12×5 Gold Support yearly subscription).

VMware

Citrix Aims To Make Creation of Hypervisor-Independent Application Workloads Easier with Project Kensho

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Citrix today announced “Project Kensho,” which will deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprise IT managers to easily create hypervisor-independent, portable enterprise application workloads. These tools will allow application workloads to be imported and run across Citrix XenServer, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX environments.

Citrix boasts this implementation will solve a multitude of interoperability issues between virtualization platforms while allowing automated provisioning and management of applications, rather than just virtual machines. Users will be able to easily install and use any OVF packaged application workload regardless of which virtualization platform they use – whether it be XenServer, Hyper-V, or ESX.

“XenServer delivers the benefits of fast, free, ubiquitous and compatible virtualization, whether from Citrix, Microsoft or VMware,” said Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems. “Project Kensho highlights the Citrix commitment to interoperability for virtualization, while maximizing price/performance and richness of features at the virtual infrastructure level.”

The OVF specification was originally co-authored by Citrix and VMware, with contributions from Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft. The companies then jointly submitted the draft to the DMTF standardization process.

Project Kensho will support the vision of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, helping customers transform static datacenters into dynamic “delivery centers” for the best performance, security, cost savings and business agility. The tools developed through Project Kensho will be integrated into Citrix Workflow Studio based orchestrations, for example, to provide an automated, environment for managing the import and export of applications from any major virtualization platform.

A technical preview of Project Kensho tools is expected to be available for free download in September 2008.

Phoenix To Integrate HyperSpace into NEC Notebooks

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Phoenix Technologies announced that NEC will be among the first PC manufacturers to integrate Phoenix HyperSpace, a virtualized operating environment that enables instant-on applications running independently and alongside Windows. NEC has signed an agreement with Phoenix which will allow it to deliver “unprecedented levels of security” for its notebook customers, enabled by HyperCore, Phoenix’s firmware-based hypervisor.

The Phoenix HyperSpace environment includes ManageSpace, which enables security applications to operate before, during and after Windows Vista boots up and shuts down. As a result, NEC notebooks will be secured before malware gets downloaded by Windows applications. This is possible because virus definition files are updated in ManageSpace while preventing Windows access to the network.

Michael Borman Joins Avocent as CEO

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Avocent, provider of hardware, software and embedded technologies for managing IT infrastructures, announced that its Board of Directors has named Michael Borman to serve as the Company’s Chief Executive Officer. He will start effective July 15, 2008, and was also elected as a member of the Company’s Board of Directors.

Borman, 53, most recently served as Vice President, Worldwide Sales, IBM Software Group. His previous roles at IBM included General Manager of the i-Series and p-Series server product lines as well as other executive positions in general management, including overseas assignments in Asia. Michael Borman also served as President and Chief Operating Officer of Blue Martini Software.

Ed Harper, who is currently serving as interim Chief Executive Officer, will continue to serve as Chairman of the Board.

[Source: AP]

Diane Greene’s Departure from VMware: The Week After

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It’s been exactly a week since word got out that VMware co-founder and acting CEO Diane Greene was leaving the company to be replaced with former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz, who prior to the move headed EMC’s cloud computing division. Evidently, this event spurred tons of reactions worldwide, with lots of speculation, analysis and predictions for VMware’s future. Now that the dust has settled a little, here’s what we gathered from the past week:

Diane Greene most certainly did not get ousted only because of the disappointing financial results and prospects. While this may have played a role in the process, it’s a fact that Greene did not see eye to eye with EMC’s CEO and VMware chairman Joe Tucci in large part because of her determination to let the company sail a largely independent path. Rumor has it that she was pushing hard for the company to be spun off, and only a few hours before her departure was making headlines in the press and on blogs, EMC shares went up on rumors of a full spin-out of VMware to shareholders with minimal tax implications starting in early 2009.

Contrary to some speculation, Greene wasn’t against selling to EMC, but she was not always happy with the way its new owner tried to steer VMware’s course. It’s very likely that ousting Greene had been on the table for several months, and that it wasn’t prompted by a single event or market dynamics. The subsequent FORM 8-k eventually stated ‘Termination without cause’.

Greene gained a lot of respect both within the company (especially from the early employees and management team) and outside, helping VMware become the fastest growing software company this side of Google, with a killer IPO as a result, an impressive market share for its core business, and loads of technological innovation which seemed to set its competitors back with every new product release. But the question remains: did Diane Greene really have what it takes to stay at the helm with competitors like Microsoft and Citrix slowly switching to full gear, while small startups started to eat away at the company’s market share with small, but nasty bites?

We believe the switch may not be such a bad thing for the company after all. Maritz is a smart, ruthless manager and he knows how to play the game. He also carries a lot of insider knowledge from his days at Microsoft (and EMC), and we believe he might be able to turn the company’s slipping revenue streams around and grow the company into a position where its competitors can’t simply crush it under their weight. Unlike some, we’re bullish on VMware’s prospects, particularly on the enterprise market. If it will play a large role in making virtualization a hot topic for SMB’s as well, remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, its stock is trading at 40.50, recovering slowly after taking a big hit following the news of Greene leaving and a slightly lower revenue forecast.

On a sidenote, we consider it a shame that with Greene’s departure, the number of female CEO’s at Silicon Valley’s 150 biggest corporations is now down to zero. However, it was already a shame there was only one before she left.

Also, we’re still wondering if Mendel Rosenblum, chief scientist at VMware, one of its 5 co-founders and husband to Diane Greene, will remain in his position at the company for much longer.

Don’t hesitate to post your thought on the above in the comments!