Diane Greene re-emerges as founder of Datrium Storage - taking aim at EMC

Silicon Valley veteran bankrolling storage start-up and luring former EMC staff

Silicon Valley veteran Diane Greene, one of the co-founders of VMware, is returning to the industry with a new start-up called Datrium, a company that is only now emerging from "stealth mode".

Datrium, according to Greene, will provide an alternative to virtualised storage and will take on her former employer EMC, which acquired VMware in December 2003 - only to unexpectedly fire her less than five years later after VMware's annual revenue growth had to be downgraded to just under 50 per cent.

The company, according to reports, has been hiring top staff from VMware, such as Mike Nelson, one of the engineers behind VMware Vmotion, a tool that enables the live migration of "running virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability, and complete transaction integrity".

The hires provide an indication of the direction in which Greene will be taking the company, with VMware's former senior vice president of cloud infrastructure, Bogomil Balkansky also being lured to the start-up.

Greene, a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has also worked at senior engineering positions at Tandem, HP and Sybase, before becoming CEO of Vxtreme. She is also a board member at Google and financial software company Intuit.

She co-founded VMware in 1998, along with Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Edward Wang and Edouard Bugnion.

It launched its first product, VMware Workstation, in May 1999 three months after it emerged from stealth mode. It was acquired by EMC in December 2003 in a deal valuing the company at $635m. However, Greene was unexpectedly fired by the-then EMC CEO Joe Tucci - to be replaced by former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz - when VMware posted revenue growth of "only" just shy of 50 per cent.

VMware's software, nevertheless, quickly became the market leader for server virtualisation software.