VMware ‘Channel Champion’ Bill Swales Departs For Lenovo

‘He was a channel champion. When we needed blocking and tackling and programmatic changes, he was there to defend the channel,’ says Worth Davis, chief technology officer at Computex Technology Solutions, a massive VMware partner

Another high-level channel executive is leaving VMware with Bill Swales taking to social media to say he is departing for Lenovo.

Swales, who worked as VMware’s vice president and channel chief of the Americas, is leaving two months after former VMware vice president Sandy Hogan left to join SADA, a top Google Cloud partner. In a post Thursday morning on LinkedIn, Swales wrote that he was “beyond proud” of the work his VMware Americas partner team accomplished.

“I am beyond proud and truly grateful for all that our VMware Americas Partner Team has accomplished in conjunction with our partner ecosystem over the past 4 years,” he wrote. “Helping our customers ‘Modernize their Applications’, embrace ‘Multi-Cloud’ and implement a ‘Work From Anywhere’ strategy has exceeded all of my expectations.”

Longtime VMware partner Worth Davis, chief technology officer at Computex Technology Solutions, said what makes a good channel leader is how they handle conflict when it arises. Davis said when that happened, Swales always went to bat for partners.

“He was a channel champion. When we needed blocking and tackling and programmatic changes, he was there to defend the channel,” said Worth Davis, chief technology officer at Computex Technology Solutions, a massive VMware partner based in Houston. “Bill’s been a great executive over the years for Computex... looking forward to his future successes. He was very channel-oriented. He understood the industry. He understood how partners succeed in their marketplaces, supported it and helped us get through the larger organizations. People make changes in their careers. I wish him the best.”

Swales said he is taking a role at Lenovo beginning in October, but did not say which job. However in his farewell note, he hinted that the role would involve partners, saying: “Our paths will absolutely cross again.”

Swales wrote that prior to that, he is planning to take classes at Yale, ride his “road bike” through Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and celebrate his 28th wedding anniversary.

The news came just as VMware is wrapping up its VMware Explore conference in San Francisco this week, where the Broadcom CEO Hock Tan was in attendance. Broadcom’s $61 billion takeover of VMware is well underway with VMware President Sumit Dhawan telling CRN that they are discussing post-closing details such as leadership, and Tan is deeply involved in those talks.

Explore featured the long-awaited debut of Project Monterey, a DPU chip that improves data center performance and energy savings by offloading compute functions onto its card. The freed-up compute is then available for revenue-generating tasks, VMware said.