Sanjay Poonen: VMware’s Success Under Broadcom Up To Hock Tan

‘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.

“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.

What do you think about Broadcom’s planned acquisition of VMware?

Really, so much of my heritage is from VMware. I love the company. So I really wish them well. I‘ve stayed close to Raghu [Raghuram, VMware CEO]. He’s a dear friend. And I really want to see that company be successful. I don‘t know what Broadcom’s plans are with it. But I hope that they’ll take technology that‘s effective for customers and make it successful. It’s got a really good brand with customers, and they’ve got lots of very good customers that actually now are huge customers of Cohesity, too. So my hope is that we’ll make a big splash at [VMware Explore], which is coming up later this year. And from my perspective, I‘m looking forward to building a super strong partnership with VMware, and I told Raghu that even before I joined [Cohesity].

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan

What does Broadcom need to do to make its VMware acquisition successful?

Far from me to give advice. Hock [Tan, Broadcom CEO] is a very talented CEO, and Raghu is a very capable leader, too. The success for any company, if I generalize, is you innovate with the products that customers like, and you obsess about customer satisfaction. If you do those two things, which is what I want to do with Cohesity, 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. I mean, VMware’s the best virtualization tool for the on-premise world that has ever been invented.

Former VMware CEO Diane Greene

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.