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Sanjay Poonen: VMware’s Success Under Broadcom Up To Hock Tan
Joseph F. Kovar
‘I hope that [Hock Tan] will continue to be a very strong leader, and I believe he will be because many large customers I’ve talked to really depend on it. I mean, VMware‘s the best virtualization tool for the on-premise world that has ever been invented,’ says Sanjay Poonen, Cohesity President and CEO and former VMware COO.

Just as a side note here, CRN talked with [VMware Founder and CEO] Diane Greene before she was pushed out of the company, after EMC acquired VMware. When asked what would ensure VMware’s success under EMC despite the angst many felt about the acquisition at the time, she said one of the things that she insisted when they put the deal together was that EMC should not change VMware to have a focus on EMC, but instead should keep its open approach to the market, because VMware’s biggest partners were EMC competitors at the time. And it seems to have worked. EMC pretty much kept a hands-off approach to VMware, which really led to VMware’s successes and growth as part of EMC, and later when Dell acquired EMC.
[Then EMC President and CEO] Joe Tucci was a key reason I joined VMware. He would say, if he was on this call, absolutely he respected that independence strategy better. And Michael [Dell] continued that, because VMware has to play on top of Dell EMC, NetApp, Pure Storage, any storage, any server vendor. And quite frankly, that‘s a very similar proposition with Cohesity. I would say probably the broader proposition is any app and any cloud. So there’s a sense of a continuity story with what made VMware, a company I had experience in, so successful.
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