More VMware Departures With Two Executives Joining Redpoint Ventures As Entrepreneurs In Residence

Two VMware executives have left to join Redpoint Ventures to help the firm extend its reach into the enterprise and mobile markets. Their leaving marks a string of recent VMware departures, following the Pivotal spinout of several of the two companies’ product groups.

Both executives joining Redpoint had important roles at VMware. Javier Soltero  was responsible for driving advanced development and strategy for application level cloud services. Soltero joined VMware after the acquisition of SpringSource in 2009. Three months prior, SpringSource, a Java framework, had acquired Hyperic, a large-scale web infrastructure management software provider. Soltero was co-founder and CEO of the company. Soltero has some Internet chops that date back to the earliest days of the web. Early in his career, Soltero worked at Netscape, where he was responsible for early Internet messaging, application servers and e-commerce technologies.

Kevin Henrikson joined Zimbra in 2005 and worked there until Yahoo! acquired the company in 2007. In 2010, VMware acquired Zimbra, where Henrikson directed Zimbra’s engineering and development roadmap planning and execution, including potential company acquisitions. He holds a published patent and a filed patent in conjunction with his work at Zimbra.

A number of VMware executives have left the company in the past year. Last week, Microsoft hired Patrick Chanezon who recently left VMware to join Microsoft as its director of enterprise evangelism. Dave McCrory also recently left VMware to join Warner Brothers. He served as one of the chief developers of VMware’s Cloud Foundry, the platform as a service.

And in January, CTO Steve Herrod left to join General Catalyst as a managing director investing and supporting early-stage enterprise companies.