When you have the perfect job, it’s not easy to walk away. I had spent the past seven years as an analyst for Burton Group and then at Gartner. In my role as an analyst, I was able to work with hundreds of end user organizations and help them with their virtualization, private cloud, and desktop transformation strategies and architectures. I was also able to take feedback from the field and work with a variety of vendors to help them shape their future innovations and product roadmaps. At Gartner, I only had to pick one side – that of the end user, and I relished playing the advocate role. I always thought that it would take the absolute perfect opportunity for me to leave Gartner, and I strongly believe VMware has provided it. In my role as CTO, Americas I will be continuing to do many of the things I loved at Gartner. I’ll be even more active in social media and community engagement, and I’ll be working closely with VMware customers across the Americas on their current and future cloud, mobile and virtualization strategies. Unlike my role at Gartner, I’ll now have a direct conduit into VMware’s talented product teams to ensure that community needs are being met and often exceeded. Sure, I could have taken on a similar role at other vendors, so why VMware? There are several reasons. This is Just the Beginning Yes – VMware pioneered x86 virtualization and VMware’s success and market dominance in the virtualization space are without question. Some have wondered if VMware’s best days are in the past, but I don’t think that’s even remotely the case. Turn back the clock 15 years and when VMware was building its flagship platform, many thought it was a gimmick with limited use cases. Most of the industry didn’t foresee that VMware would fundamentally reshape the enterprise data center like it has. If you look at the work that VMware has done with the software-defined data center (SDDC), it’s easy to see that industry skepticism is back. VMware ESX quickly became a no-brainer business decision because the server consolidation benefits it provided (not to mention the flexibility afforded by vMotion and DR simplicity). With SDDC, we’re beyond servers – we’re now talking data centers. At full maturity, the SDDC will do for data center consolidation what ESX did for server consolidation, and once again the ROI benefits will be obvious. One could argue that the cloud era will also accelerate data center consolidation, and that’s true. However, when you consider the vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) and the massive vCloud service provider network, VMware is well-positioned to offer the most...