Bull's Eye Awards: Chief Executives of the Year - CHALLENGER
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Paul Maritz
Take a company that owns most of a segment’s market share with no signs
of losing it – well, that would seem like a cushy job for a CEO. But
mix in a handful of formidable competitors, including ones like
Microsoft (which has been known to easily eliminate challengers under
former executives, like, say, Paul Maritz) and maybe it’s not such an
easy job after all.
That’s
just the place Paul Maritz inherited when he was appointed CEO of
VMware a little more than a year ago, and his strategic moves to
advance the technology, shore it up with acquisitions and make the
right competitive moves have won him the Challenger award in Channel
Insider’s Bull’s Eye CEO of the Year Award.
Maritz is no stranger to Microsoft, having spent more than a decade
of his career there, and having led Microsoft’s battle against
Netscape’s Internet browser, eventually crushing the upstart company.
Now Maritz is defending VMware’s formidable market lead in the
virtualization market. And he’s doing so handily.
Case in point: Analysts say that VMware oversold licenses of its
vSphere server virtualization technology into the enterprise in 2008 in
anticipation of Microsoft’s first release of its own hypervisor,
Hyper-V. The strategy has worked so far. Even though many companies are
running trials of Microsoft’s Hyper-V-based virtualized server
environments, very few are using Microsoft’s technology for production
servers. VMware still rules the enterprise.
Another case in point: VMware’s acquisition of SpringSource in
September. Maritz has called the company a leader in Java development,
and its framework is being extended to a new generation of Web
programmers. That potentially leads to new development capabilities for
VMware in cloud configurations, something that Maritz’s VMware is
exploring in the form of its vCloud initiative through partnerships
with AT&T, Verizon, Savvis, Terramark and others.
And finally, Maritz’s VMware has released the long-awaited VMware
View 4, which enables PC-over-IP. The desktop virtualization technology
that can deliver a virtualized desktop to thin client hardware comes at
a time when it could disrupt the also long-awaited enterprise PC
refresh.
So watch out VMware competitors. Paul Maritz is our Challenger
winner in Channel Insider’s Bull's Eye Award for CEO of the Year.
