VMware Veteran Chen Takes Enterprise App Venture Capital Post

Longtime VMware (VMW) executive Jerry Chen has joined the Greylock venture capital firm as a partner focusing on cloud and application infrastructure and new enterprise applications. Greylock, an old line VC firm founded in 1965 with $2 billion under management, announced Chen’s appointment in a corporate blog post, in which the VMware veteran said he looked forward to working on the “post-server era.”

Chen worked at VMware since 2004, most recently as vice president of Cloud and Application Services vice president. During his tenure, VMware transitioned from a virtualization software developer to a cloud- and software-defined data center provider, growing from 400 employees to 15,000 and to some $5 billion in annual revenue.

“We’ve gotten to know Jerry over the past several years and believe his talent, energy and integrity are a great fit for our partnership,” the VC firm said. “Jerry is joining Greylock at an exciting time in the enterprise software market and in our portfolio. The enterprise space is undergoing a massive transformation driven by growth in cloud and mobile computing, Big Data and the consumerization of IT.”

While at VMware, Chen was part of the team that created the open source platform Cloud Foundry. He handled product management and marketing teams responsible for application infrastructure software vFabric and the Spring Java framework. While involved in creating VMware’s enterprise desktop and application virtualization businesses, he is said to have coined the phrase “Virtual Desktop Infrastructure,” commonly known now as VDI.

Greylock said that Chen will fit in well, particularly with its concentration on the enterprise application space, having recently backed IPOs in the past two years for Workday (WDAY), Palo Alto Networks (PANW), ServiceNow (NOW) and Imperva (IMPV), and supplied funding to emerging companies such as AppDynamics, Cloudera and Pure Storage.

“Jerry’s experience gives him a unique view of these rapid shifts in the enterprise technology space, and we’re thrilled to have him on board as we move into what he and others have referred to as a ‘post-server era,’” the VC firm said.