Goodbye Pat – A Loss for VMware, a Gain for Intel

VMware

February 8, 2021

Goodbye Pat – A Loss for VMware, a Gain for Intel

Lots of things have been said about Pat Gelsinger moving across to Intel on 15th February 2021 but I thought that this would be a great opportunity for me to share my thoughts.

Although I now work for VMware, most of my professional career and my interactions with VMware prior to this were as a customer. I started working with VMware back when Diane Greene was in charge and have therefore been working with VMware through the Diane Greene, Paul Maritz and Pat Gelsinger times.

But this isn’t about me… it’s about Pat moving back to Intel.

Pat has been very open about his past, having started out at Intel as a quality-control technician in 1979, at the age of 18. Intel have always been good to Pat, whilst he was there, he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Santa Clara University and then a master’s degree from Stanford University. One of his biggest claims to fame was as an architect for the original 80486 processor.

Over the course of his time at Intel, he became the first Chief Technology Officer for them and helped to drive the creation of key industry technologies such as USB and Wi-Fi. Pat stayed with Intel for 30 years of his career before leaving Intel to join EMC in September 2009, as Chief Operating Officer. In September 2012, Pat took over the Chief Executive Officer role of VMware from Paul Maritz with one of his first engagements seeing him standing on the main stage at VMworld delivering the key note.

During his time with VMware, he has certainly made a difference. He has fundamentally changed the way that VMware works and helped to create the EPIC2 values that we use everyday within VMware. The success that he has had within VMware has been shown in the fact that VMware has grown significantly in his tenure and has continued to evolve. VMware is no longer a one-trick pony who is only focused on virtualising physical servers as virtual machines. VMware now has a solid, consistent strategy of providing Any App, on Any Device, on Any Cloud.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing. In the 9+ years that Pat has been at VMware, there have been some false starts with the strategy but persistence and ‘grit’ have become the way to establish a strategy that will see VMware into the next evolution.

So, why is Pat moving back to Intel. Well, if you think about it, Pat is Intel through and through. When you’ve spent much of your formative professional years with a company, who have given you a number of opportunities, then you feel an allegiance to them. VMware is certainly losing a star in their day-to-day running, but on a positive note, Pat will be joining the VMware board, so will still be involved. It goes without saying that Intel have lost their way a bit over the past few years, and Pat heading up their revival is certainly a good thing for them.

From a computing and gaming point of view, I can understand why people have been moving to AMD processors rather than Intel processors. Part of this has to come down to the fact that each generation of Intel processors pretty much requires a new socket and therefore a new motherboard… whereas with AMD chips, they are still using the AM4 socket across multiple generations.

Anyway, enough of that, I have seen kind words being spoken from a number of VMware staff over the past few weeks, and it is obvious that Pat will certainly be missed within VMware.

To that end, I’ll just add my best wishes to Pat in his new adventure with Intel.