Software giant Microsoft has appointed John Thompson, former CEO and chairman of security and storage vendor Symantec, to its board of directors.
Thompson is currently CEO of storage management vendor Virtual Instruments. He stepped down as CEO of Symantec in 2009 after ten years in the role, and as chairman of its board of directors in 2011.
His appointment brings Microsoft’s board back up to 10 members. It has had just nine directors since 2009, when Harvard business professor James Cash did not stand for re-election.
In an interview with Information Age last year, Thompson said described virtualisation as the latest paradigm shift that would reshape the IT industry, after client-server computing and the web. "Every eight to ten years, a significant transition occurs that changes the IT landscape.”
Microsoft was the main benefactor of the former shift, but is still in the process of building a profitable web business. In the virtualisation space, the company plays second fiddle to VMware, although both IDC and Gartner have found its share of the hypervisor market to be growing. Gartner predicts that Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor, will have won 85% of the companies with fewer than 1,000 employees that use virtualisation.
