Oracle Hires Former VMware, Microsoft Senior Partner Exec

An itinerant go-to-market (GTM) executive for more than 25 years, Ross Brown, who recently held the title of senior vice president, worldwide partners and alliances at VMware, is now vice president, cloud go-to-market, at Oracle.

Oracle’s Ross Brown

Brown worked at VMware from 2015-2018 and Microsoft’s worldwide partner group, partner strategy and compete, from 2008-2012. Brown took a 20-month sabbatical after leaving VMware, and most recently worked as an investor/advisor for Joyful Brands, for more than six years, a position that overlapped with his stint at VMware.

Oracle didn’t respond to inquiries.

When it comes to Oracle’s cloud business, the company, in October, announced plans to hire almost 2,000 new employees to work on its growing cloud infrastructure business.

“Cloud is still in its early days with less than 20 percent penetration today, and enterprises are just beginning to use cloud for mission-critical workloads,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Our aggressive hiring and growth plans are mapped to meet the needs of our customers, providing them reliability, high performance and robust security as they continue to move to the cloud.”

At the same time the company also said that it would make additional real estate investments to support the expanded Oracle Cloud Infrastructure workforce.

On the VMware front, in September, at Oracle OpenWorld 2019, the two companies announced a certified VMware Solution on Oracle Cloud. The new offer allows customers to build VMware virtual server environments natively on Oracle Cloud infrastructure.

In other hiring news at Oracle, the company extracted Ariel Kelman, who worked at AWS for six years, to be the new CMO at Oracle. Kelman replaces Rupal Shah Holenbeck, who worked at Oracle for just over a year. She previously worked at Intel for more than 23 years.