New VMware CEO Says Partners Put Company 'On the Map,' Pledges Support

New VMware CEO Rangarajan “Raghu” Raghuram wants to help partners grow their businesses and take advantage of new opportunities with the company.

Raghuram will become CEO on June 1. Currently executive VP and COO of products and cloud services, he joined VMware nearly 18 years ago.

The search for a new CEO began after Pat Gelsinger decided to leave VMware to return to Intel in February as its CEO. He served as VMware’s CEO for more than eight years.

Since joining VMware, Raghuram has helped steer the company’s strategic direction and its technology evolution. In addition, he helped grow the core virtualization business and drove VMware’s software-defined data center strategy.

Moreover, he built and guided VMware’s cloud computing business and SaaS transformation efforts. He also played a pivotal role in the company’s M&A strategy.

Dell is spinning off its VMware ownership in the fourth quarter of 2021.

VMware’s Raghu Raghuram

In a Q&A with Channel Futures, Raghuram talks about what partners can expect from his leadership.

Channel Futures: What do you want VMware’s partners to know about your new role?

Rangarajan Raghuram: First of all, I want to give a huge thank you to our partners. As someone who started at VMware when there were roughly 200 employees, I can tell you that partners put VMware on the map. A vast majority of our business today continues to flow through our partner ecosystem.

CF: What do you want partners to know about your plans for leading the company?

RR: A key to VMware’s success, which will continue, is not to disrupt for disruption’s sake, but rather to build on the needs of our customers. As we become the leader in the multicloud era, we go where our customers go, across public, private and hybrid clouds. Our ecosystem partners have a critical role to play.

CF: Can VMware partners expect to benefit from your leadership? Will you be creating new opportunities for them? If so, how?

RR: We want to help our ecosystem partners grow their traditional business, but at the same time help them take advantage of new areas of spend. [Those include] cloud, the edge, modern apps and security, for example. Expect more from us across all of these areas. We want to help our partners take their customers where they need to go.

I’m extremely confident in our partner organization, led by Sandy Hogan. She is driving the teams. And they are hyper-focused on one mission: unleash the power of connected ecosystems to create customer-for-life value. My top focus areas are tightly aligned with many of Sandy’s priorities. [Those are] turbocharging our partner ecosystem, including accelerating franchise platform growth, building a cloud and services ecosystem, creating connected ecosystem solutions and helping our partners scale their capabilities.

CF: What’s at the top of your to-do list?

RR: VMware has a strong foundation. But there are places we need to accelerate our evolution, while maintaining strong execution. We see great opportunities, as customers deploy their applications across multiple clouds, data center and edge. This is the multicloud era of computing. We will be focusing here as a clear opportunity. VMware is uniquely poised to lead the multicloud computing era with our any cloud, any application and anywhere strategy, helping our customers accelerate their digital transformation. We have the right solutions, and the right team. And we will continue to execute with focus, passion and agility.

We are also seeing excellent growth in subscription and SaaS offerings as customers change their buying preferences to be more opex-based. We are putting a lot of emphasis on building our subscription and SaaS business, and investing in our future, while delivering the technologies and solutions today that help our customers and partners with their digital transformations. This includes bringing forward flexible subscription offerings that simplify the purchase and consumption of VMware offerings.