Nicera, a New Virtualization Company to Follow

VMware’s founder Diane Greene has resurfaced, writes Alessandro Perilli in Virtualization.info. Greene appears as an investor in a startup named Nicira, along with Andy Rachleff, Partner at Benchmark Capital.


In July 2008, the VMware Board of Directors removed founder Diane Greene as CEO. Greene was offered another position that she declined, leaving the company that she created and led through one of the most impressive IPOs in IT history.

Nicira, founded in early 2009, is in stealth mode at the moment but its website reveals its mission is to virtualize networks. The company is managed by Steve Mullaney, who comes from Palo Alto Networks and Blue Coat Systems, where he was Vice President of Marketing.

According to Rachleff, Nicira appears to be working on a “Network Operating System” or NOX.

A number of employees, along with Stanford and Deutsche Telecom researchers, published a couple of research papers (one and two) about this topic in late 2009. The team advocates the need for a centralized programmatic interface to observe and control large scale networks. The NOX would provide such API while 3rd party vendors would build applications that leverage the API.

I'm looking forward to reading these technical papers and on learning more about Nicira.