Second co-founder forced out of VMware

The husband of former VMware CEO Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, has followed his wife out the door, announcing his resignation just days before VMware hosts an annual event to showcase its virtualisation technology.

Greene and Rosenblum co-founded VMware and led the company for a decade, before VMware's board forced Greene out in July. Rosenblum, the company's chief scientist and a professor of computer science at Stanford University, initially stayed with VMware after his wife's firing.

Then on Monday night this week he announced his resignation from VMware in a company-wide message, according to The New York Times.

The Times story reveals some interesting details about the events leading to the departures of Greene and Rosenblum. Joseph Tucci, the CEO and president of EMC, which bought VMware five years ago, met with Greene and Rosenblum after a board meeting on 7 July to tell Greene she was fired. Tucci asked Rosenblum to take over his wife's seat on the VMware board, but Rosenblum declined, according to the Times story.

Rosenblum did not announce his resignation until the week before VMworld, an annual show hosted by VMware that has become a huge industry gathering for virtualisation companies. The show is next week in Las Vegas, and competitors such as Microsoft and Citrix are expected to be at the conference and continue their push to undermine VMware's dominant share in the server virtualisation market.

Three of VMware's five co-founders have left the company since the purchase by EMC. Former CTO Edouard Bugnion departed in 2004. Co-founders Scott Devine and Edward Wang, both principal engineers, still remain.

But VMware lost one other executive earlier this month when research head Richard Sarwal left for a post at Oracle after being with VMware for less than a year.

Greene was replaced as CEO by Paul Maritz, a former Microsoft executive.