Former Red Hat, Docker Channel Vet Takes VMware Tanzu Post

VMware is snatching up Kubernetes channel sales veteran Roger Egan as the virtualization superstar continues to double down on VMware Tanzu by recruiting the industry’s top container talent from its competitors.

Egan is VMware’s new vice president of the Americas for VMware Tanzu. In a LinkedIn post, Egan said he’s looking forward to working with VMware in the Americas “to build a world class business together.”

Egan held various top channel sales roles and executive positions at IBM for more than 15 years before joining Red Hat in 2007. He was responsible for sales, operations, business development and customer relationship management for all of Red Hat channels and alliances partners as well as SMB sales in North America as vice president of North America channels alliances and commercial.

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VMware Tanzu competes head-to-head against Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform. Tanzu is a portfolio of Kubernetes-based services and VMware Cloud Foundation that incorporates vSphere 7.0, the new rearchitected flagship product with direct integration of the container orchestrator into the vSphere virtualization platform.

In a recent interview with CRN, VMware’s Sanjay Poonen said he feels “very good” about VMware’s strategy and position in the Kubernetes and container market compared with Red Hat.

“We will compete with OpenShift but we will do it honorably. May the best product win. I’d like to get to 5,000 customers before they do, and we have to go get customers who are undecided about it,” said Poonen, chief operating officer at VMware. “They said there are 1,700 customers of OpenShift after about 10 years of working on that project. As we’ve acquired Pivotal Software and Heptio, we feel very good about our strategy. The founders of Kubernetes are Craig [McLuckie] and Joe [Beda]. They are with VMware now. So we feel very good about our mind share in the Kubernetes community.”

Following a nearly seven-year stint at Red Hat, Egan joined Docker at senior vice president of sales and channels in 2014. Last year, Egan became executive vice president of global sales of Siemplify, which provides security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) offerings.

“It’s really great to get another person in the leadership position that has broad industry experience in Red Hat and Docker to be able to build upon VMware’s Kubernetes strategy to continue to be a leader in this space,” said Stephen Ayoub, president of Chicago-based AHEAD, a VMware partner ranked No. 36 on CRN’s 2020 Solution Provider 500 list. “This is a big win for VMware.”

Egan could not be reached by press time.

“Roger brings a wealth of experience, passion and leadership to our team,” said Sam Alkharrat, senior vice president and global head of sales for VMware Tanzu, in a LinkedIn post. “I’m delighted to have Roger Egan join our VMware Tanzu team.”

VMware Tanzu offers a complete set of container technologies that enable weaving modern applications into an enterprise’s application portfolio. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is the runtime for deploying multicluster container environments on any infrastructure, while Tanzu Mission Control delivers centralized management. VMware’s acquisition of Bitnami has yielded the Tanzu Application Catalog, which brings together all the incorporated open-source technologies needed to scale those workloads.

“We are going to focus on Kubernetes, and we’re going to do it in a multi-cloud fashion,” said Ray O’Farrell, executive vice president and general manager responsible for VMware’s Kubernetes strategy, in a recent interview with CRN. “What we’re now trying to do is make sure that if people are using containerized Kubernetes applications, whether it’s private or public clouds, that we’re able to offer them the build, manage and run technologies coming from our application [business unit] as well as the security technology coming from our security [business unit]. We want to expand how containers and Kubernetes are secured.”

It’s been a busy July for VMware. The Palo Alto-Calif.-based company unveiled plans this month to acquire hyperconverged infrastructure startup Datrium as well as Blue Medora’s True Visibility Suite business unit, which develops tools for automating the management of applications and hybrid infrastructure.