Raghu Raghuram takes over from Pat Gelsinger as CEO of business-software maker VMware. Raghuram, currently VMware’s chief operating officer in charge of products and cloud services, will take the reins in June, the company said on Wednesday.
Chief financial officer Zane Rowe has been serving as VMware’s interim CEO since February.Raghuram has been with VMware since 2003, when the company was still a startup.
Over the years, VMware has grown into a nearly $12 billion business, selling so-called virtualization software that allows a single corporate server to operate like multiple servers, improving the performance of a company’s IT operations.
Raghuram told Fortune he has been spearheading VMware’s push into selling software that lets companies run their internal and external apps in multiple cloud computing services and in-house data centers.
Companies like IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are all pushing this notion of multi-cloud, or hybrid cloud, technology as the future of corporate IT.Compared with Gelsinger, Raghuram said he considers himself “more of a technology-centric leader.”
Raghuram said he has “no intention” to follow in Gelsinger’s footsteps. He added, “Fundamentally, I’ll be spending most of my time on what’s good for VMware, customers, and associated industry technologies,”
Raghuram said that VMware also plans for its employees to continue working remotely and will not require them to return to physical offices full-time, he said. Similar to tech companies like Salesforce and Google, VMware employees will work in a hybrid model.
VMware also named Sumit Dhawan to be the company’s president while COO of customer operations Sanjay Poonen will leave the company.
