VMware is going through a time of major transitionn.
Its former CEO of eight years, Pat Gelsinger, departed to lead Intel in February and it's spinning off from Dell later this year. Meanwhile, it continues to make greater investments in the cloud, and a hybrid strategy in particular (where customers move some of their workloads to the cloud, but retain others in private data centers). Experts say that there are challenges ahead for the company, but also major opportunities too.
First, though, VMware needs to find a replacement for Gelsinger:
"They really need to bring a CEO quickly," Sid Nag, vice president at Gartner, told Insider. "Whether it's outside or an insider, they need to announce that role quickly."
VMware has seen other top executives leave the company recently, too. It lost its SVP of worldwide customer services, Jim Delia, to ServiceNow in June, followed in July by chief customer officer Scott Bajtos fleeing for FinancialForce. Former COO Rajiv Ramaswami became Nutanix's new CEO last December and in January, cloud management general manager Ajay Singh departed to become chief product officer at Pure Storage. This exodus has left analysts concerned that there "may be trouble brewing beneath the surface."
VMware is also in the midst of transitioning to more cloud-based offerings, including through a new division called the Modern Applications Platform business unit, which targets developers by building products with Kubernetes, an open source cloud computing project started at Google. As part of this strategy, VMware has acquired developer startups Pivotal and Heptio.
In addition, VMware has forged big partnerships with the major cloud providers, including Microsoft and Amazon Web Services – although it considers AWS its "preferred partner." VMware said last year that its hosting on AWS has risen 130% year-over-year.
The firm also plans to build more cybersecurity tools into its products.
To see how its leadership shapes and reflects these strategies and more, Insider put together a list of the firm's top power players.
Meet VMware's most influential executives as the firm seeks a new leader:
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Zane Rowe, chief financial officer and interim CEO
Zane Rowe is VMware's CFO and has also served as the interim CEO since February as the company searches for Gelsinger's replacement. He leads the strategy and corporate development team, planning VMware's long-term M&A strategy and investments.
Before VMware, Rowe served as CFO at EMC and led North America sales at Apple. He started his career in the airline industry, where he had served as CFO of Continental Airlines and United Continental Holdings.
"He understands this stuff really well," Daniel Newman, principal analyst at Futurum Research, told Insider. "He can lead the helm during the transitional period."
Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer for customer operations
Sanjay Poonen serves as the chief operations officer of VMware, overseeing worldwide sales, services, support, marketing, and partnerships.
He also is responsible for VMware's security strategy and business and was at the forefront of its $2.1 billion acquisition of the cyber firm Carbon Black.
"Sanjay was instrumental in so many of the companies' strategies and running the direction of the company's business," Futurum analyst Newman said. "He's been an outspoken leader. He has a great understanding technically and also at the executive level to articulate the story of VMware's strong position in the market."
Before VMware, Poonen held executive roles at SAP, Symantec, VERITAS, and Informatica. He started his career as a software engineer at Microsoft and later Apple.
Several analysts believe Poonen is the frontrunner to take-over VMware's CEO role if the company decides to pick someone internally.
"Sanjay is very capable," Newman said. "He's executing the business and getting products into the market. When the company turns the corner and comes out of this deal, that's the kind of leader you will need."
Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer for products and cloud services
Raghu Raghuram serves as the COO for products and cloud services, including support and operational functions. He first joined the company in 2003 and has held leadership roles heading the company's data center, cloud infrastructure, and virtual infrastructure businesses.
Before VMware, Raghuram worked in product management and marketing at AOL, Bang Networks, and Netscape.
"Raghu has been playing a big role," Glenn O'Donnell, vice president and research director at Forrester, told Insider. "He's been growing a big part of the business for a long time."
Bask Iyer, senior vice president of industry solutions and verticals
Bask Iyer heads VMware's industry solutions, which is focused on selling to customers in specific industries like finance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and more. This is a critical element of VMware's growth plans.
Iyer has worked at VMware since 2015 and has served as chief information and chief digital transformation officer, heading the global information and technology organization and integrating companies VMware acquired. From 2016 to 2018, he also served as CIO of Dell Technologies.
Before VMware, Iyer served as CIO at Juniper Networks and Group CIO at Honeywell.
Ray O'Farrell, executive vice president in charge of VMware's cloud apps business
Ray O'Farrell serves as an executive vice president at VMware, where he is leading the integration efforts and strategy for VMware's business unit for cloud applications. This unit is devoted to building solutions in Kubernetes, a widely-used open source cloud computing project for running large-scale applications that was originally started at Google.
VMware has rebranded its Kubernetes products, which is a major part of its strategy, as Tanzu.
"He's got a lot of momentum in the company right now as everything is revolving around Tanzu," Forrester analyst O'Donnell said.
O'Farrell has been at VMware since 2003 and served as CTO before his current role. He has also led VMware's networking, management, and storage businesses and he built out its research and development organization, too.
Greg Lavender, chief technology officer
Greg Lavender, who serves as CTO, joined VMware in January 2018 and leads research and innovation for VMware.
He previously served as a CTO at Citigroup and corporate vice president of network software at Cisco. He has also worked at Sun Microsystems.
"In a company like VMware, the CTO has a lot of influence," Forrester's O'Donnell said. "He's got a lot of impact on what's to come in the future."
Carol Carpenter, chief marketing officer
Carol Carpenter joined VMware as its chief marketing officer in June 2020, overseeing the company's global marketing organization.
Previously, Carpenter was vice president of product marketing at Google Cloud. She has also served as CEO of ElasticBox and held leadership and marketing roles at Trend Micro, Keynote Systems, and Apple.
Mike Hayes, chief digital transformation officer
Mike Hayes just joined VMware in October as the chief digital transformation officer, leading the company's worldwide business operations and its transition to a software subscription model.
Before VMware, Hayes served as senior vice president and head of strategic operations at Cognizant Technologies and worked at the investment management firm Bridgewater Associates. He previously spent two decades in the US Navy SEALs where he served throughout South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
Jason Conyard, chief information officer
Jason Conyard serves as VMware's chief information officer, leading its global information and technology organization to support the company's business operations.
Conyard first joined VMware in 2015 and originally headed up internal technology for employees. Before VMware, Conyard worked as the vice president of IT at Juniper Networks, and held roles at BlackRock, Global Communications Partners, and Symantec.
Purnima Padmanabhan, senior vice president and general manager of cloud management
As senior vice president and general manager of cloud management, Purnima Padmanabhan leads the team responsible for building cloud management products and services so that its customers can work with a mix of various clouds and data centers.
Before VMware, Padmanabhan served as CEO of the cloud security company Cavirin and COO of the desktop virtualization company MokaFive.
James Watters, CTO of the Modern Application Platforms business unit
Since January 2020, James Watters has served as the CTO of VMware's new Modern Application Platforms business unit (MAPBU). The goal of MAPBU is to deliver products for application developers, especially products for running Kubernetes, a Google-born open source cloud project for large-scale applications. This group includes VMware's acquisitions of Pivotal and Heptio.
Before serving as CTO of MAPBU, Watters served as senior vice president of products at Pivotal, which VMware acquired for $2.7 billion (which boomeranged him back to VMware, because he had worked there before joining Pivotal). He has also previously worked at Sun Microsystems.
Forrester's O'Donnell calls Watters "an influential voice" who led a lot of the strategy at Pivotal.
Kit Colbert, vice president and CTO of VMware Cloud
Kit Colbert is the vice president and CTO of VMware Cloud, where he drives the technical strategy for VMware's multi-cloud products.
Colbert has spent nearly 18 years at VMware and has also served in leadership roles in other business units, including Cloud Platform, Cloud-Native Apps, and End-User Computing.
Forrester's O'Donnell called Colbert "another influential visionary who led a lot of VMware's cloud management success."
Sanjay Uppal, senior vice president and general manager of the service provider and edge business
Sanjay Uppal serves as the senior vice president and general manager of VMware's service provider and edge business unit, meaning that he runs its telecommunications and networking products.
Previously, Uppal was the CEO and cofounder of VeloCloud Networks, which VWware acquired in 2017. Uppal has also previously served as president and COO of OnMobile Global, and held leadership roles at Citrix, Caymas Systems, Webvan, and Hewlett-Packard.
Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, creators of Kubernetes and cofounders of Heptio, which was acquired by VMware in 2018
Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie created Kubernetes, which took Silicon Valley by storm, when they worked at Google. They left and started the Seattle-based Heptio in 2016, which makes Kubernetes easier to use and more secure for large enterprises and which VMware acquired in late 2018 for $550 million.
Beda and McLuckie continue to work at VMware, which has become a major code contributor to Kubernetes and has made it a core part of its strategy to help customers create and manage cloud applications.
Kubernetes could also provide a viable alternative to the virtualization technology that VMware has long been known for building.