What are some of the opportunities you are excited for partners to see now that VMware is an independent company? 

What our aim is and you know, once we had the spin-out in November of last year, we got a really good five-year commercial framework agreement in place with Dell, and our aim now is, ‘Hey, let‘s look at the rest of the ecosystem and take some of the learnings that we had there with Dell, and spread that onto the rest of the ecosystem where we go a little deeper.’

So let me give you some examples. If I were to look at HP, and Lenovo, who may have been a little bit reticent to work with us in the past, they’re now in a position where they’re fully embracing us, and putting multi-year plans together with us to embrace the VMware solutions and bring the best to their customers and to their partners.

We’ve got conversations going on with HPE with Greenlake, with (Lenovo) TruScale, and really trying to understand not, ‘What’s in it from the VMware perspective,’ but ‘What’s in it from their perspective? What are they trying to achieve with their customer base, their partner base, and how do we fit into that? How do we – VMware -- become part of their ecosystem, not just them becoming a part of ours?’

So it‘s really working towards becoming a true partner to them. Whereas I think, you know, maybe we’ve tended to be a little bit “one-way traffic” in the past.