Maritz can probably be expected to lower VMware's product prices, Jones says. "The pricing will be the biggest change as time moves forward. Competition always drives prices down," he says.

Greene told Network World in a recent interview that VMware is focusing on shifting its value proposition from the hypervisor to the management software that improves the effectiveness of the virtualization engine. But Jones says VMware didn't make that shift soon enough.

"When we talked to them seven months ago, they were still trying to differentiate on the performance and capabilities of the hypervisor," he says. "We were telling them very strongly, 'no, you need to differentiate on the management side.'"

VMware's management tools fall short in at least one area, in that they focus on the virtual environment only. The VMware tools can be used to provision a virtual machine, but not a physical one, Jones says. VMware's software also is blind to the performance of applications running inside a virtual machine.

"There's a whole bunch of pieces they have missing, when you look," Jones says. "They don't know what applications are in [virtual machines], and how well they're performing."

Maritz has a tall task ahead of him, but it's hard to predict what type of changes he will make.

"The jury's still out on Paul," Jones says. "I mean, he's just been announced. I bet you his own people don't really know much yet."