All Change at the Top – VMware

As you will have seen over the past couple of months, there have been a number of changes occurring at the top within VMware.

My previous blog post focused on Pat Gelsinger leaving to head back to Intel (and he seems to be doing some good stuff there in his first few months).  So this saw Raghu Raghuram named as new Chief Executive Officer.  Raghu has been with VMware since 2003 and therefore has seen a lot of change within the business in that time, with his track record within VMware, he’s a safe pair of hands to take the company forward.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the leadership roles that Raghu has held during his time at VMware.  His most recent role was Chief Operating Officer, Products and Cloud Services.  That role meant that he had responsibility for all of VMware’s product and service offerings and centralised services, support and operational functions.  With that background, he is positioned as the ideal person to help transform VMware towards a SaaS company.  Before COO, Raghu was Executive VP and General Manager of VMware’s SDDC business.  If we jump right back to how it all started for Raghu within VMware, we see that he started by running product management for ESX and vSphere.

So there have been some other changes that have occurred within VMware as well.  We said goodbye to Sanjay Poonen who was Chief Operating Officer for Sales, Marketing, Services, Support and Alliances.  Alongside Sanjay leaving, VMware also lost Greg Lavender who was Chief Technology Officer and led the Office of the CTO within VMware.  There were others that left as well, including Rajiv Ramaswami, Ravi Kagalavadi and Clement Pang.

This, obviously, meant that vacancies at the top table were available with the biggest winner being Kit Colbert.  Now Kit Colbert has been with VMware for quite a long time, himself joining back in 2003 as well.  Kit started within VMware in more humble roles than Raghu but was a Senior Staff Engineer for vMotion and Storage vMotion between 2005 and 2009 before progressing up to Principle Engineer/Chief Architect for vCenter Operations Management Suite and then a similar role for Horizon Workspace.  In 2014, Kit really started making progress becoming VP & CTO of End-User Computing before moving onto a similar role in Cloud-Native Apps and additional similar roles before landing the big job of taking over from Greg Lavender as Chief Technology Officer.

I wish both Raghu Raghuram and Kit Colbert success in their new roles.