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Borland CEO leaves for VMware COO job
On his Tod

By Charles Cooper

Published: Wednesday 07 January 2009

VMware on Tuesday named Tod Nielsen to be its chief operating officer, his sixth different company since the millennium.

Nielsen had been Borland's chief executive since November 2005. Before that he held executive roles at Oracle, BEA Systems and Microsoft. He also served a stint as CEO of Crossgain, before a non-compete spat with Microsoft forced him to step aside. BEA later acquired Crossgain.

In the role of VMware's COO, a newly created job, Nielsen will be reporting to CEO Paul Maritz, his former colleague - and boss - at Microsoft, where he worked for a dozen years.

Maritz said in a statement that the appointment would free him up to concentrate in other areas while Nielsen would focus on business, marketing and operations. "Having worked closely with Tod [Nielsen] in the past, I know that we will work effectively together and complement each other," he said.

VMware, one of 2007's hottest IPOs, has lost a lot of its early lustre since then. The company faces increased competition in the virtualisation market from Microsoft, IBM, Xen, and Oracle - and then there's the overhang of a deepening recession.

While at Microsoft, Nielsen played a minor role in the months'-long courtroom drama when the US Justice Department sued Microsoft for antitrust violations. When Microsoft's witnesses first began taking the stand, they struggled during the cross-examination. At that point, Microsoft flew Nielsen out from Redmond to provide needed technical handholding.

Separately, Borland announced Tuesday that it was cutting its workforce by about 15 per cent, or 130 employees. It also said that preliminary fourth-quarter revenue would fall between $38.5m to $40m. The company previously had forecast full year revenue of $180m to $200m. Erik Prusch was named acting president and CEO to replace Nielsen; he was previously CFO.