Julia Austin

 What a great way to spend a Saturday by being inspired by some of today’s top female leaders of our industry and meeting many young women aspiring to be the next generation of leaders!  The Women’s Student Association at Harvard Business School invited me to participate on the Technology panel at the event.  Not only was it a pleasure to share my thoughts and experiences being a woman in the tech industry, but I also had the great pleasure of sharing the discussion with Kimber Lockhart (Box), Carrie Householder (Amazon) and Julia White (Microsoft).  First time I’ve even been on a panel with another Julia! Our excellent moderator was Kathy...

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In an industry where new technology seems to leapfrog what was just new only a moment ago, it is critical for software companies to think strategically about their innovation programs.  VMware has maintained its culture of innovation throughout its history and we plan on continuing our track record of introducing game-changing technology solutions to the IT industry for years to come. In the past year VMware demonstrated its commitment to innovation in many different ways. We introduced the concept of the software-defined datacenter to our industry – along with offering new and unique methods to manage datacenters at the scale and performance our customers require. VMware also had its very first Open Innovation contest where we invited our community to submit Fling ideas ( see who won here! ) and we will continue to involve...

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Back  in August  at VMworld I announced  that VMware is taking a new approach to driving innovation by launching our very first  Open Innovation Contest . We asked our community to send us their best  Fling  ideas, and the contest winner will have their Fling built by VMware engineers. The winner also gets a free pass to VMworld 2013.  The contest ran through October 31, 2012 and we got an amazing response with over 120 great ideas!  About half the ideas were feature requests, rather than Flings, and the good news is that many of these were already in the pipeline for future VMware software releases.  The judges evaluated all the true Fling-type ideas and we were...

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A group of women from VMware recently attended the  Grace Hopper Celebration  in Baltimore.  This is an important event that brings together technical women for several days to discuss technology trends, get career support and learn from thought leaders.  While I was not able to attend this year’s event, I had a chance to catch up with some of those who did and want to share their direct feedback and experiences: “This was my second time attending the GHC and it was as energizing as the first time! It is an amazing feeling to be surrounded by so many accomplished women each with a unique story.  I was lucky to be included in a session led by Rebecca Shambaugh, author...

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As I look back on VMworld in San Francisco, I can’t stop thinking about how the theme of Innovation permeated throughout the conference this year!  Things got rolling when Steve Herrod showed demos of new product and feature ideas we’re working on during his Day One keynote .  Following Steve’s keynote, I had the pleasure of sharing a behind the scenes look at how we innovate at VMware via a Spotlight Session.  My talk included three idea pitches that were presented during VMware’s internal innovation offsite – providing an inside look at the broad and novel ideas we encourage our engineers to pursue.  The pitches covered ideas on how to make data centers environmentally aware to account for heat, power and other...

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I recently attended the World Innovation Forum in NYC ( #WIFNY ) – and thanks to WOBI who runs this event, there was a great line-up of amazing innovation thought leaders addressing how companies are staying competitive by increasing their innovation edge.  There was so much greatness to soak in!  I’d like to share some of the key messages that stood out to me from this event. First off, it’s clear that innovation is on every company’s strategic agenda no matter what industry. The key is how each company develops a culture of innovation that includes both revolutionary and evolutionary generation and implementation of ideas. Full solutions, including services, are fundamental to product survival. It’s not the product itself,...

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I had an amazing experience recently helping a friend set up a beehive on her property.  Throughout the process, I was taken with the intricate details of how a hive functions and the role of each bee and their CEO, the queen.  I wondered how much of their elaborate system of egg nurturing to honey-making was simply a matter of evolution or if it was more complex than that.  So, I did a little research…   What I found out is that each bee serves a purpose and collaborates with one another.  They have a sophisticated communication system or “dance” and in the tens of thousands, they work as a highly efficient team.  Most interesting to me however is that they have a well...

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