Diane Greene, VMware president
Position: 8 Last year: Not ranked
Why? Making virtualisation a business must-have
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VMware CEO and co-founder Diane Greene has made this year's list for turning virtualisation from a little-known technology with a very small customer base into one of the most successful IT tools available - and with no signs of slowing down, according to one panellist.
While the term virtualisation has been around since at least the 1960s, recent developments have refocused attention on the concept - thanks in part to Greene's innovative efforts at VMware and in the software field.
Greene released a desktop virtualisation product in 1999, followed by one for servers in 2001. In doing so, she brought virtualisation out of the mainframe bunker and onto industry-standard x86 hardware, which had never been designed to be virtualised.
EMC acquired VMware for $635m in 2003 and recently announced its intention to sell around 10 per cent of VMware in February.
But Greene is not resting on her virtual laurels and continues to come up with new ideas - including how to keep an IT service available even when the server it is running on fails.
Greene has held technical leadership positions at Silicon Graphics, Sybase and Tandem and was CEO of internet business video firm VXtreme. She also serves on the board of Intuit and has degrees in computer science, mechanical engineering and naval architecture.
Take a walk down memory lane - and find out who made the agenda setters poll in years past
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"Open source gets more important rather than being something that will get squeezed out of the enterprise."
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