VMware's CEO talks Microsoft, security, EMC and cloud computing

Any idea why these rumors crop up from time to time, though?

The situation VMware is in, where we're 86 per cent [owned by EMC] and a partial spinout [on the stock market] is an unusual situation and has some instability associated with it. Naturally people are watching that closely. If you looked at data on companies that get partially spun out, generally something happens afterwards, you know it evolves one way or another.

You've discussed in the past how it was important to keep the operations of VMware separate from EMC, even though EMC owns VMware. Who do you report to? Is there any interference from on high?

VMware is now a separate public company from EMC. As CEO I report to the VMware board.

Which is composed mostly of EMC executives?

The VMware board is mostly EMC, either directors or officers of EMC. What we're focused on at VMware is our partnering, that's very key to how we go to market, how we integrate, and executing on our strategy.

Do you ever feel friction or have strategic disagreements with EMC?

I find that it's important to be very articulate about how in order for VMware to realize its full potential -- and we're in an amazing position right now -- the importance of our partners and our ability to execute in an unfettered way.

You co-founded VMware with your husband. What is his current involvement with the company and what's your business relationship like?

VMware had five co-founders and Mendel Rosenblum, who is my husband, is our chief scientist. He's also a professor of computer science in the systems space at Stanford University where he continues to be a full-time professor. But he is also very involved at VMware one day a week and on an ongoing basis.

Is there a next wave of virtualization we don't know about?

What we're doing with computers is getting more complex. The sophistication with which we handle delivering applications with the top quality of service and security. The next wave is using virtualization to provide a complete simplification of how you do that -- being able to build, develop, deploy, maintain and update applications, where an application can be a composite application of multiple virtual machines, and delivering that from any place over any set of hardware resources, be it on-premise or off-premise in a cloud, if you will.

How does cloud computing play into virtualization?

Virtualization is really the key building block to being able to do cloud computing, because the notion of a cloud is that all the resources are kind of aggregated, sort of magically, and you just run services from the quote cloud. It's very important you be able to separate the software from the hardware and move it around without any service interruption. And be able to have the application take with it the quality of service it wants. So what customers want is complete freedom of choice. They want to take their application and run it anywhere in any cloud. The only way to do that is with virtualization.