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VMware President Sumit Dhawan Takes On Broadcom Deal, R&D And Partner Questions
O’Ryan Johnson
CRN asks partners what they want to hear from top VMware brass as the company prepares its first—and possibly last—VMware Explore as an independent company.
Whatever plans VMware had prior to May were surely disrupted when Broadcom appeared with a $61 billion deal in hand.
Since then, the company that had banked on 2022 being its year of independence, is now staring at being taken over by its third owner in the past 20 years: this time the giant chipmaker Broadcom.
Throughout this tumult—which has included high-level executive departures on both sides of the deal— VMware President Sumit Dhawan told CRN the company has not stopped executing on its goals: overhauling its partner program, Partner Connect; debuting updates to its flagship compute product vSphere as well as to its storage product vSAN; and embracing multi-cloud.
[RELATED STORY: AS VMWARE EXPLORE BEGINS, COMPANY PRESIDENT VOWS ‘INNOVATIONS ARE HERE TO STAY’]
“What we’re seeing is customers adopt the power of new innovative services that are coming from different clouds because different clouds deliver different innovative new services,” Dhawan said. “Some may provide better searches in an elastic fashion, some may provide cheaper storage, some may provide better identity services. And across these different clouds, customers are sort of now creating the next-generation architectures of modern applications that assemble these services across cloud. And our innovations are centered around it.”
Dhawan sat down for an interview ahead of VMware Explore in San Francisco. This is the company’s first event since being spun out of Dell Technologies last October. While the company’s plans for a multi-cloud future could be disrupted by Broadcom, Dhawan said he doesn’t think so.
“We are making these announcements with the full belief that these innovations are here to stay and serve the customers for years, if not decades to come,” he said.
Here’s what he had to say about the Broadcom deal, aligning the business with technically sophisticated partners, R&D and what’s ahead for leadership.
