Pat Gelsinger Leaves VMware for Intel - Opinion
Transcript
>> Can't be a lot of changes at VMware in Intel, One, or two of my sponsors of the channel we've done sponsored content by both Intel and VMware Intel sponsors the CTO Advisor Hybrid Infrastructure and VMware recently sponsored some content around software-defined networking in SAS disclosure. But you know what? Pat Gelsinger leaving VMware is one thing that we kind of expected to happen during a DM conversation with one of my analyst peers, the question came up with how long did we expect Pat to be at VMware?
And my answer was until Bob Swan left Intel, Pat Gelsinger long-term Intel alum, first CTO at Intel, there's always been this general idea in the industry that when the time was right Pat would leave VMware for Intel given the opportunity, the time is right. However, how does this impact both companies? Pat will continue to be on the board of directors of Intel seeing that Intel and VMware are very, very close partners and there's not much reason for VMware to lose the complete talent of Pat Gelsinger.
Well, let's talk about VMware first, Pat is pretty much the heart and soul of VMware if you talk to their employees my limited time working there for six months it was very evident that not only was VMware's corporate values which they label Epic Tool is in alignment with Pat's personal values, the big part of recruitment that VMware used was this personality of Colt, we don't talk about it a lot in enterprise technology that many enterprise IT companies are driven by or not many are driven by personality of Colt Oracle is one with Larry Ellison, Larry Ellison's personality just permeates throughout Oracle this is the case with VMware, Pat Gelsinger, his personality of generosity, fierce fierce competitors see competition with Nutanix permeates throughout VMware.
So VMware will be losing a big part of their cultural identity with Pat Gelsinger, I talked to some VMware employees they feel that VMware as a culture will survive that, that's to be seen more importantly from a customer and potentially investor perspective recruitment of talent is a big deal, I've tweeted back on the fifth that VMware had been leaking talent, they had lost their head of sales for their HCI solutions to Pure Storage, they lost their head of cloud to Nutanix, most recently they lost yet another cloud related talent in a time period that VMware can not afford to lose cloud talent as they look to make the argument that VMware Tanzu and VMware vSphere and HCI are the way of the future for the hybrid infrastructure.
Let's switch over to Intel, Intel is in trouble as the sponsor of the CTO Advisor of Hybrid Infrastructure, I have no problem saying that Intel has a very very solid strategy around making sure that processors isn't the only part of their story, you can look at the CTO browser, hybrid infrastructure page and see how Intel is talking about network storage, well networking and storage as part of their IO stack and then processors is part of the processor stack and then bringing in management telemetry data security as part of their kind of five tier stack around the data center of the future, very solid enterprise IT story execution is a problem, pure speeds and fees and cost of processing Arm, Nvidia, AMD are attacking these pillars of Intel's relationships.
One of the more complicated ones has been Amazon, Amazon doesn't give numbers, but I'm sure that the majority of workloads that run within Amazon's cloud are based on Intel processors, so Amazon being Amazon is going to put pressure on Intel to reduce the cost that Intel receives from Amazon to one run workloads you seeing a lot more AMD being promoted inside of AWS as well as Arm on their Graviton platform. But you know what? It's pretty hard to scale that stuff and get customers to trust non Intel workloads but Amazon has enough incentive, how does this relate to Pat and what Pat can do?
Because it takes a long time to fix the processor issues, well, let's look at what he did at VMware. We all said back five, six years ago that VMware was basically dead because Amazon was going to cannibalize their virtualization market share just by giving away easy choose management plane as part of consuming Amazon's cloud virtual machines, that didn't happen for two reasons, customers are extremely resistant to change, enterprise IT customers change slowly, that is to the benefit of Intel but VMware was extremely astute Pat specifically and partnering with Amazon in a way that we did not predict both AWS and VMware are extremely bullish on VMware cloud on AWS, VMware cloud on AWS is the only other cloud Andy Jassy has ever spoken of on stage at AWS reinvent.
Can Pat recreate some of that magic within Intel? Can he work the biggest dev with Apple, Amazon, Enterprise IT vendors who are looking at Arm as an alternative or migration path away from x86? Can he partner in that way? Will he look at x86 as kindest Holy Grail that can't be disturbed at VMware? Again, he partnered with Amazon recently, maybe a year, a year and a half ago Intel acquired our Arm license. I don't know, I'm not making predictions I'm just saying that bringing then this new blood that understands competition, understands the overall market and can come up with creative business solutions, as the technology eventually catches up to the peers, Intel will be fine from a manufacturing perspective, at some point they'll figure out the 7-nanometer process, but can Pat help to kind of save the business until then?
You know, it'll be exciting to see. I love your feedback, what do you think are the most interesting attributes of the transition of Pat Gelsinger from VMware to Intel? How does that impact VMware? Where are the holes? And Intel how does Pat's impact on Intel realistically impact the market? You as an enterprise IT customer I'd love to hear feedback @CTOAdvisor on Twitter or you can join the conversation on LinkedIn. Talk to you next CTO Dots.
