Data center News
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.
Sanjay Poonen Expects Big Things Of VMware
Sanjay Poonen, who last year left VMware as chief operating officer and this week re-appeared as CEO of data protection company Cohesity, still has a lot of friends at his former employer, including VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram. And so as Broadcom prepares to close its acquisition of VMware, Poonen hopes the latter can maintain the success it has had since its founding in 2008 through its 2004 acquisition by storage vendor EMC and Dell’s 2016 acquisition of EMC and VMware.
Poonen, in an exclusive meeting with CRN, said that while he is not familiar with Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, he is very close friends with Raghuram. However, he said, both executives are very smart people, and can be expected to do what is best for VMware’s customers and employees.
[RELATED STORY: AVIATRIX CEO ON POTENTIAL POST-BROADCOM VMWARE LAYOFFS AND WHY ON-PREM MARKET IS ‘THE TITANIC GOING DOWN’]
“The success for any company, if I generalize, is you innovate with the products that customers like, and you obsess about customer satisfaction,” he said. “If you do those two things … that’s what makes great companies successful. I’m sure Raghu will keep doing that. I hope Hock will keep doing that. I don’t know him. But I hope that he 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.”
For a look at how Poonen hopes to see Broadcom’s acquisition of his old company VMware plays out, and on the lessons Broadcom can learn from history when looking at how others have succeeded when acquiring VMware, click through our slideshow.
