VMware execs Bob Schultz and Sumit Dhawan were in leadership training in Boston during their first day at their new company. They promised to respond to my inquiries regarding their new positions as soon as possible. When they do, I’ll report what they said.
The news of their move came as a seeming lightning strike on the first real work day of 2014. Officially, they give Wmware “even deeper end-user computing and industry expertise going into 2014 and position us very well to continue to provide customers with industry leading solutions,” according to a blog entry by Sanjay Poonen, EVP & General Manager of the company’s End-User Computing (EUC) Unit.
Schultz fills a new positions as chief strategy lead for the EUC, “and will be responsible for driving our business, technology and alliance strategies,” according to Poonen. He’s a 30-year veteran (writer’s note: I personally like this age group) and was Group VP and General Manager of Desktop and Applications at Citrix.
Sumit Dhawan, who was with Citrix for almost 16 years, “will lead our desktop business and organization and be responsible for the overall business including overseeing the strategy, product portfolio and engineering,”
Not to be lost in this announcement was the promotion of long-time VMware exec Kit Colbert to the position of CTO of the EUC.
DaaS Re-Boot
So let’s call this “DaaS Re-Boot,” with apologies to the creators and fans of the 1981 film with a similar name. That film centered around a submarine crew in a crisis situation, and perhaps serves as a close analogy to the virtualization business.
It’s hard for me to pin a dollar figure on the size of DaaS (and desktop virtualization by other names). But it’s clear that VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft are now competing hard in a tight, claustrophobic environment for access to every desktop in the world.
Poonen specifically mentions Vmware’s acquisition of Desktone (the folks who were trying to patent DaaS) in October as part of the dynamism of the desktop virtualization market. He also mentioned “enterprise mobility and enterprise social collaboration” as growth areas in this space.
Citrix Announces New Exec
For its part, top management at Citrix is remaining outwardly calm. “We have a strong leadership team in place, including the new executive for our app and desktop virtualization business, which was announced this morning,” a company spokesperson told me in an email.
The newly named Citrix exec is Rakesh Narasimhan, a 25-year industry veteran “with 15 years in leadership positions at Microsoft, and whose expertise fits squarely in the Citrix market space,” according to Citrix’s note to me.
Narisimhan served as a General Manager in Microsoft’s Server and Tools division, covering Microsoft Azure, SQLServer, Windows Server, Windows Client, virtualization, storage, data protection and security products,” according to Citrix.
He was most recently President and CEO at InstallFree, a developer of application portability, virtualization and access soluions that delivered Microsoft Office as a subscription-based cloud service to any device. He also has experience at Oracle.