Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer
Transition in our industry…and for me!
For more than 11 years, I have had the privilege of sharing details about the remarkable products, people, partnerships, and strategies that make up the VMware family. I have shared these via this blog, at our VMworld or vForum events, on twitter, in 1-on-1 discussions, or with my many friends in the VMUG, vExpert, PTAB, and other technical groups. I have enjoyed these interactions immensely and learned so much from my time in this role. And so today it is with both excitement and sadness that I announce my transition from VMware to a new adventure as managing director at General Catalyst, a premier venture capital firm jointly based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Palo Alto, California.
I am amazed by the changes our industry has undergone over the last decade. Virtualization has become the default technology upon which the majority of the world’s server applications run. What’s more, virtualization’s impact is rapidly extending into storage, networking, security, and every other aspect of the modern datacenter. The resulting “software-defined datacenter” is clearly the architecture of the future, enabling the efficient private, public, and hybrid clouds that are becoming part of every company’s IT strategy.
There is also a renaissance in how we consume applications. We’re in a world where we continue to use Windows applications, but augment them with web, SaaS, and mobile applications. It’s also a multi-device world where tablets and smart phones join PCs and laptops as our omnipresent technology sidekicks. The grand challenge is to help organizations offer these new choices to their employees while keeping company information safe and secure. Throw in dramatic changes in the way we write applications, analyze massive amounts of data, share files, or communicate with one another, and you can understand why I’m so excited about today’s technology world!
It is indeed an incredible time to be in our industry, and the challenges ahead will keep engineers busy for many years to come. And engineers are at the core of my proudest accomplishment at VMware: helping to build and develop one of the best system software teams anywhere. This team is well poised to continue to change the world of enterprise computing.
It is this team-building experience that I’m hoping to leverage in my role at General Catalyst, extending it into an even broader technology domain. My primary focus will be finding, supporting, and developing great technical entrepreneurs as they build the products and companies that they’ve always dreamt of building. These companies will bring the same tremendous energy, creativity, and innovation to these and other challenges, just as VMware has for so many years.
Again, it’s been an incredible journey at VMware, and I look forward to my ongoing role as a technical advisor to the company. I’ve appreciated every single day of the last 11 years, and here’s to an exciting future ahead for each and every one of us!
Sincerely,
Steve Herrod (@herrod)