VMware gets new CTO in Greg Lavender
Ray O'Farrell, Pat Gelsinger, and Greg Lavender at VMworld 2019
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger has announced his company's existing chief technology officer, Ray O'Farrell, will be moving on to lead VMware's cloud-native efforts.
O'Farrell, who joined VMware in April 2003, will now be charged with overseeing the company's new Tanzu portfolio.
Making the announcement at VMworld 2019 in San Francisco on Tuesday, Gelsinger revealed that current SVP & CTO of Cloud Architecture in the Office of the CTO Greg Lavender would step up to fill O'Farrell's role.
"Can I just say how important Kubernetes is to us, the Tanzu strategy that we've laid out, the Pivotal merger that we're working on aggressively and I couldn't think of a better, more capable leader to bring these capabilities than our 16 year veteran having done products and code and now CTO for five years," Gelsinger said.
"I have never been more proud to announce Ray O'Farrell as leader of our cloud-native efforts moving forward."
As CTO, O'Farrell was responsible for VMware's long term technology leadership through research and innovation programs, which had the primary goal of positively impacting and shaping the future of VMware, its ecosystem, and its customers.
He has also been responsible for VMware's partnerships across the industry, with a focus on the Dell Technologies family of businesses.
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Prior to assuming the role of CTO, O'Farrell co-led the Software-Defined Data Center Division of VMware, comprising the vSphere, networking, management, and storage businesses. He was responsible for the division's strategy, business, and product planning and engineering execution.
Meanwhile, prior to joining VMware Lavender was managing director of global data centre and enterprise infrastructure architecture and engineering at Citi and VP of Software Engineering for OS kernel, security, virtualisation, and networking protocol technology at Cisco and Sun Microsystems.
Disclosure: Asha Barbaschow travelled as a guest of VMware to VMworld in San Francisco.