John Thompson is the chairman of Microsoft. The 65-year-old technology exec used to pilot Symantec, turning the digital security firm from a jet into a rocket in ten years. (Under Thompson, Symantec’s revenues rose to $6 billion.) Before Symantec, Thompson was a big shot at IBM. He’s outrageously rich and retirement might seem like a pretty nice option. But Thompson doesn’t just mind the giant store that is Microsoft, he’s the day-to-day CEO at Virtual Instruments. And he likes it.
Virtual Instruments provides real-time monitoring and analytics to enterprise IT organizations through its VirtualWisdom product. As Thompson tells Business Insider in an interview: “If you have a very mission-critical, performance-sensitive application environment, you are a target for the Virtual Instruments platform.” The company counts “50 or 60” of the Fortune 500 as clients. (Here’s betting Microsoft is one of them!) As Thompson tells Business Insider about Virtual Instruments: “2015 should be a big year for us. As they say down South where I grew up, ‘Lord willing and the creek don’t rise,’ we can hit $100 million.”
