VMware is supposed to report its second-quarter results on Tuesday July 22 and people will be tuning in to see how EMC’s abrupt ouster of the virtualization leader’s CEO and co-founder Diane Greene last week is handled and what is added to the news that VMware isn’t going to make its full-year 2008 guidance of 50% growth over 2007.

Parent company EMC said last week that VMware would come in “modestly below” its revenue goals because of a more challenging spending environment but left Q2 guidance of 55% growth in place.

Revenues were up 69% in Q1. Stanford Bernstein is projecting only 38% growth in the second half.

Presumably Greene’s successor, former Microsoft biggie Paul Maritz, will be introduced all around.

Once one of the troika that ruled Microsoft, Maritz, if anybody, should know how to compete against VMware’s worst enemy even if he’s been gone from Redmond for the last eight years.

Which, one suspects, must have been why EMC picked up Maritz’s option to begin with – Greene wasn’t cutting the mustard and she was a pain in the ass and wanted VMware spun off from EMC.

As Bernstein observes, VMware missed expectations or lowered guidance twice in the last six months, which impacted on EMC.

Maritz is supposed to take VMware to the proverbial next level against Microsoft’s early release of its Hyper-V hypervisor and its free-with-Windows-Server-2008 price point. Hyper-V isn’t as well developed as VMware.

Perhaps Maritz will explain if VMware is being redirected considering EMC picked him up in February when it acquired his hazy start-up Pi Corporation and put him in charge of a new Cloud Infrastructure and Service Division that it has never fully explained.

The unit included Fortress SaaS, EMC’s multi-tenant infrastructure, the company’s Mozy online backup service and some other mysterious EMC infrastructure systems and software EMC was developing.

Pi, which is short for Personal Information, has something to do with how people find, access, organize, share and protect their personal data without having to set up their own external servers and infrastructure, a vision that included replicating information across machines and devices, which suggests that VMware may more serious about desktop virtualization or maybe Maritz will just say you can’t have clouds without virtualization.

All this commotion of course has cut the legs out from under VMware’s stock, which is now struggling to stay above $40 and losing the fight, a far cry from the glorious post-IPO summit of $125 that it hit last fall and has been receding from ever since after investors realized there was competition.