Continuing to tap into the "green IT" trend is another part of Paul Maritz's strategy. Photo / Supplied

Continuing to tap into the "green IT" trend is another part of Paul Maritz's strategy. Photo / Supplied

On the face of it, Paul Maritz seems to be three months into one of the global IT industry's jobs from hell.

He stepped in to become chief executive of former market darling VMware at the darkest time in the company's history.

Eleven months after VMware pulled off the most successful share float since Google, a boardroom bust-up saw Maritz's popular predecessor unceremoniously ejected from the company in July with several key senior executives following her out the door.

The company's share price has been in free fall and its previously unique products are now being duplicated by a number of competitors, not least Microsoft.

Despite all this, Maritz exuded an air of intellectual calm this week in Sydney, where he spoke to Connect ahead of a keynote address in the city yesterday to a company event which pulled in more than 1000 of VMware's corporate customers.

His response to the fact that the company's super-trendy "virtualisation" business technology has proven so popular it has generated an industry of imitators?

"The price of success is always that you attract competition and that means, as with any technology business, you can't afford to stand still," he says.

"Others are catching up to us but we're not standing still. It's our intent to move ahead and we're really about a much broader company now than one piece of software."

That piece of software at the heart of VMware's early success is something called a hypervisor, a platform for allowing multiple operating systems to run on a single computer at the same time. The "virtualised" computing environment this enables is attractive to businesses because it means they can make much better use of their IT resources.

Where traditionally an individual server in a corporate data centre could run only one operating system or software application, meaning it typically performed at about 10 or 15 per cent of its capacity, using virtualisation each machine can be used at near full capacity, leading to huge savings in resources and power use.

The attractiveness of the virtualisation market has seen other vendors, including Microsoft, jump in for a slice of the action.

Timothy Stammers, an analyst with IT research firm Ovum, noted last month: "Microsoft clearly intends to use all of its massive marketing muscle in its attempt to gain control of this critical market."

VMware's success in commercialising virtualisation led to a run of triple-digit annual sales growth and a spectacular IPO last year. Its shares floated at US$29 ($47) and spiked to US$124. But as growth has levelled back to double-digit rates, and with the internal ructions, increased competition and the global economic crisis, the share price has slumped to around US$24.