Last year, VMware welcomed a new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, who replaced Paul Maritz.  At the time, Maritz exited the company and will not serve in any position under the EMC umbrella.  Lo and behold, Maritz is now Pivotal’s head.  Pivotal is the latest EMC/VMware spinoff.

But this isn’t the only executive level shakeup we’ve seen amongst EMC and its subsidiaries in recent months.  As we gear up for VMworld, several questions remain for the virtualization firm regarding its staying power in a rapidly transitioning market.  C-level shuffles are often indicative of internal changes, impacting company culture, products and public perception. So what other executive shake ups has VMware experienced since its new CEO was appointed?

Hello and goodbye

In October 2012, VMware opened its doors to Jonathan Chadwick to serve as its new chief financial officer and executive vice president.  He previously served as Microsoft’s vice president and as the CFO of Skype.  Chadwick replaced Mark Peek, who left to serve a Workday’s CFO.

VMware CTO Steve Herrod left his position in January to join venture capital firm General Catalyst, where he serves as managing director.

Tod Nielsen, the onetime COO of VMWare, was tapped by Salesforce to run its Heroku platform-as-a-service offering for software developers in June.

Catch up on key VMware acquisitions and product launches here!

Javier Soltero, VMware’s CTO of SaaS, and Kevin Henrikson, senior director of R&D for Zimbra, the open-source email product VMware acquired from Yahoo in 2009, both left the company to serve as entrepreneurs in residence at Redpoint Ventures.

VMware sales chief Mike Clayville joined Amazon Web Services as VP of worldwide commercial sales. Rick Jackson left his CMO position at VMware and now assumes the same title at Rackspace.  Scott Musson, director of VMware’s global alliances is now VP of global alliances at Red Hat.

Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s senior vice president of cloud infrastructure products left and joined VMware co-founder Diane Greene’s startup back in July.  John Gilmartin, who had been VP of VMware’s storage business was named VP of cloud infrastructure products.

Ben Verghese, a 12-year VMware veteran who served as the company’s chief management architect, left for startup Illumio.  He now serves as VP of Engineering at Illumio.

EMC global marketing CTO and top blogger Chuck Hollis joined VMware last August 1 to serve as its chief strategist.

Sanjay Poonen joined VMware as head of its end-user computing group.  Poonen previously held the position as the president of global solutions and go-to-market for BI giant SAP.

A clue to something bigger?

Though the executive shakeups might seem like people are abandoning a sinking ship, VMware is far from sinking.  The company recently beat analysts’ expectations when it posted second quarter earnings of $244.1 million or $0.57 per share, up from $191.7 million in the same period 12 months ago.  VMware sales were up 11 percent to $1.24 billion from $1.12 billion in the prior year comfortably beating analysts’ expectations of $1.23 billion.

Even with competitors piling up and the enterprise looking for alternatives in the hypervisor market, VMware remains one of the most popular choices.  During VMware’s earnings call, it was revealed that enterprise license agreements are way up.

“This is always really good because these are customers that are fully in on VMware.  They’re not going to be trying to decide when they buy a new server whether they use VMware or competitor — since they have an enterprise license, every server they put it, they’re going to use VMware,” said Stu Miniman, Wikibon Senior Analyst, explaining VMware’s good fortune.

We recently had an opportunity to sit down with VMware’s newest CEO Pat Gelsinger at EMCworld earlier this year, where he shared his vision of  software-defined infrastructure (full video below).

And with VMworld just around the corner, we can expect more surprise from the company as 2013 continues to unfold.  Be sure to check out our other pre-event recaps on VMware – click below.

VMware + OpenStack : A Brief but Strained History

VMware This Year: Key Acquisitions, Mobility + OpenStack

VMworld Highlights 2012 : Looking Back to See Forward

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