Podcast appearances and mentions of sanjay poonen

Data is the new gold. In fact, a breach or loss of this valuable asset in a company can potentially drag them into bankruptcy or in the worst case, put them out of business altogether. So how can businesses strengthen their cyber resilience while navigating a world where data is the new currency? Sanjay Poonen, CEO, Cohesity joins the Breakfast Show to discuss what you need to understand about the evolving landscape of digital threats and how his acquisition of Veritas' data protection business is revolutionising the game of data protection and management. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, we are joined by Sanjay Poonen, CEO and President of Cohesity, a leader in AI-powered data security and management. Sanjay, a Harvard alumnus, shares how nearly half of the Fortune 100 rely on Cohesity for business resilience. A decade ago, Cohesity aimed to revolutionize data management by simplifying backups and data protection on a single platform. This vision continues to drive their innovations today. Recognized as a leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cyber Recovery 2023 Vendor Assessment, Cohesity's team includes experts from Google, Nutanix, VMware, and more. Sanjay, with his extensive experience in scaling multi-billion dollar businesses and leading strong teams, discusses his expertise in cloud, applications, infrastructure, analytics, and security. Join us as Sanjay Poonen reveals Cohesity's journey and how they help the world's largest organizations enhance business resilience in a dynamic digital landscape.

Will the Cohesity and Veritas merger usher in a new era in data security & AI? Hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman are with Cohesity CEO, Sanjay Poonen for Six Five On The Road, where they dive into the merger between Cohesity and Veritas, highlighting the emergence of the world's largest data protection provider and what it means for the future. Hear more about ⤵️ - The strategic vision behind the merger between Cohesity and Veritas - The start of a new era in data protection, where security, AI, and customer-centricity converge - How this merger positions Cohesity in the data protection and management market - Future innovations in data protection technologies - Cohesity's roadmap post-merger  

RAG is revolutionizing data protection and Cohesity is driving it forward to pull insights from secondary data. Host Patrick Moorhead is joined by Cohesity's President & CEO, Sanjay Poonen, on this episode of the Six Five On The Road at AWS re:Invent. They discuss the intersection of cybersecurity, innovation, and the future landscape of the tech sector. Tune in for more on ⤵️ The future of data protection, AI, and the $7 BILLION Veritas acquisition Emerging trends for 2025: IPO, M&A activities, AI regulation, and investment changes The current M&A climate of within the security sector The 5 S's of data strategy: Sanjay shares his framework for building a winning data strategy: Speed, Scale, Security, Simplicity, and Smart (AI)  The critical role of cyber resilience in ensuring business continuity, informed by Cohesity's Global Cyber Resilience report findings The data goldmine: The importance of not just protecting data (defense), but also using AI to unlock its full potential (offense). Think "Snowflake meets Palo Alto"

Sanjay Poonen, CEO & President of Cohesity   M&A isn't just about signing a deal and popping the champagne. Every CEO knows the entire process is a minefield of cultural clashes, integration headaches, and occasional unexpected challenges that could blow up your strategy. But while M&A can be a high-stakes game, it's also one that can be mastered with the right playbook.    In this episode of the M&A Science Podcast, we're diving into key strategies CEOs should consider to ensure M&A success, featuring Sanjay Poonen, CEO & President of Cohesity.   Things you will learn in this episode:   • The CEO's approach to M&A integration • Key considerations in sourcing deals • Best practices for managing large-scale acquisitions • The impact of market timing on acquisition strategy   ******************* Experience the M&A event of the year and gain actionable insights to scale your M&A practice. Register now for the Fall M&A Science Fair here.   This episode is sponsored by DealRoom. Ready to take your M&A to the next level with software made to manage each stage of the deal process? See how DealRoom can facilitate your next deal at https://dealroom.net   ******************* Episode Timestamps 00:00 Intro 04:06 Exploring high-impact M&A deals 05:33 Shaping the M&A strategy 07:16 Expanding and innovating through acquisitions 11:18 The CEO's approach to M&A integration 20:08 Key considerations in sourcing deals 25:25 Cultivating cultural alignment 29:42 Convincing companies to do an M&A deal 36:51 Maintaining key relationships 38:36 Best practices for managing large-scale acquisitions 40:38 Strategic considerations for a global expansion 41:37 The right timing for announcing deals  43:35 The impact of market timing on acquisition strategy 44:53 Advice for CEOs on preparing for a successful IPO position 46:47 Craziest thing in M&A

Email us with any feedback for the show: spark@postion2.comFind more great content like this at: https://www.position2.com/If you like what you here, please drop us a comment!Episode Description:Ever wondered how the titans of the tech industry navigate the intricacies of data management and transformative mergers? Strap in as I, Rajiv Parikh, engage with Sanjay Poonen, the visionary CEO of Cohesity, in a riveting discussion that spans from personal triumphs to the avant-garde of data security. Get a front-row seat to Sanjay's insights on the Cohesity-Veritas merger and its colossal impact on the future of data protection, all while drawing from his wealth of experience at VMware and academic ventures at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth.Peel back the layers of cybersecurity with us as we address the pivot of ransomware targeting secondary data. We're not just discussing the 'what' of this revolution; Sanjay and I are delving into the 'how,' with behind-the-scenes looks at strategic partnerships with NVIDIA and IBM that are crafting a more fortified cloud hardware and software ecosystem.It's not all tech and tactics, though. Prepare to be moved by stories of empathy and leadership that echo the profound human journeys behind the tech empires. From Bangalore to Silicon Valley's boardrooms, Sanjay's narrative is a testament to the transformative power of service and the importance of grounding innovation with a human touch. Rajiv Parikh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajivparikh/Sandeep Parikh: https://www.instagram.com/sandeepparikh/Sanjay Poonen X: https://twitter.com/spoonen; Sanjay Poonen LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjaypoonen/Producer: Anand Shah & Sandeep ParikhTechnical Director & Sound Designer: Sandeep Parikh, Omar NajamExecutive Producers: Sandeep Parikh & Anand ShahAssociate Producers: Taryn TalleyEditor: Sean Meagher & Aidan McGarvey #entrepreneur #security #artificialintelligence  #innovation #growth #saas #saasmarketing  #marketoutlook  #sales #ai #consultant #consulting #technology #innovatorsmindset #innovators #innovator #product #revenue #revenuegrowth #management #managementconsulting #founder #entrepreneurship #data #analytics #dataanalytics #growth #growthmindset #growthhacking #salestechniques #salestips #enterprise  #business #bschools #bschoolscholarship #siliconvalley #company #companies #smartgrowth #efficiency #process #processimprovement #value #valuecreation #funny #podcast #comedy #desi #indian #communityhttps://www.position2.com/podcast/

Watch Carol and Tim LIVE every day on YouTube: http://bit.ly/3vTiACF. Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, former CEO of Celebrity Cruises, discusses being named President and CEO of The FIFA World Cup 2026 Miami Host Committee. Sanjay Poonen, CEO at Cohesity, talks about the proliferation of artificial intelligence.   Hosts: Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec. Producer: Paul Brennan.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of The Six Five – On The Road, hosts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead welcome Sanjay Poonen, President and CEO at Cohesity for a conversation on Cohesity's strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) by integrating Cohesity Turing with Amazon Bedrock. Their discussion covers: A look at Cohesity's Turing integration with Amazon Bedrock How this generative AI solution will allow customers to use the latest AI capabilities to better manage, interact with, and gain insights into their data Cohesity's new upcoming capabilities for protecting AWS and VMware workloads Learn more about Cohesity's partnership with AWS, on the company's website.

Sanjay Poonen, CEO at Cohesity, discusses how geopolitical issues raise cybersecurity concerns.Hosts: Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec. Producer: Paul Brennan. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sanjay Poonen, CEO at Cohesity, discusses how geopolitical issues raise cybersecurity concerns.Hosts: Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec. Producer: Paul Brennan. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Meet Cohesity's visionary leader, Sanjay Poonen, in an exclusive interview hosted by Jess Larsen. Discover the strategies that have made Cohesity one of the fastest-growing companies in the industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of the Moor Insights & Strategy Insider Podcast, host Patrick Moorhead is joined by Sanjay Poonen, CEO and President of Cohesity. Their conversation covers: * Collaborating on security, AI, and cloud with Microsoft * Advancements and integrations with Microsoft * Extending Cohesity-managed SaaS to be hosted on Azure * Cohesity's exciting vision for AI * How Cohesity is addressing AI and language models concerns * Their shared vision with Microsoft * And their partnership with IBM This is a fascinating conversation you won't want to miss!

In this podcast, I interview Sanjay Poonen. Sanjay is an Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at VMware. Previously at VMware, Sanjay held the role of Executive Vice President and General Manager for the End-User Computing business unit. Before VMware, Sanjay held executive roles at VMware, SAP, Symantec, Veritas, and Informatica, and he began his career as a software engineer at Microsoft and Apple. I hope you enjoy!

In this podcast, I talk to Sanjay Poonen about his career. Sanjay is an Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at VMware. Previously at VMware, Sanjay held the role of Executive Vice President and General Manager for the End-User Computing business unit. Before VMware, Sanjay held executive roles at VMware, SAP, Symantec, Veritas, and Informatica, and he began his career as a software engineer at Microsoft and Apple. I hope you enjoy!

Sanjay Poonen, CEO and President at Cohesity shares his insights on the intersection of Data Protection, Data Management, and Data Security. He also discusses his thoughts on ransomware recovery warranties and insurance and the formation of the Security Advisory Council.

In episode 48 of EnterpriseReady, Grant Miller is joined by Sanjay Poonen. This expansive conversation draws on Sanjay's long and storied career in software, from the early engineering days at Apple and Microsoft to his executive and entrepreneurial experience building and scaling multi-billion dollar businesses. Together, Grant and Sanjay unpack invaluable lessons on engineering, product management, marketing, sales, work-life balance, and much more.

In episode 48 of EnterpriseReady, Grant Miller is joined by Sanjay Poonen. This expansive conversation draws on Sanjay's long and storied career in software, from the early engineering days at Apple and Microsoft to his executive and entrepreneurial experience building and scaling multi-billion dollar businesses like VMware. Together, Grant and Sanjay unpack invaluable lessons on engineering, product management, marketing, sales, work-life balance, and much more.

In episode 48 of EnterpriseReady, Grant Miller is joined by Sanjay Poonen. This expansive conversation draws on Sanjay's long and storied career in software, from the early engineering days at Apple and Microsoft to his executive and entrepreneurial experience building and scaling multi-billion dollar businesses like VMware. Together, Grant and Sanjay unpack invaluable lessons on engineering, product management, marketing, sales, work-life balance, and much more.

I tried to get Sanjay on the podcast to talk about finances, he wanted to talk about leadership. I wanted to ask him about investing, he wanted to talk about impact. This man is truly a great and humble leader. I walked away from this convo ready to level the heck up. Special Shout out to our Sponsors: Border States Electric: Suppling all your electrical needs. In KC ask for Jason Bradley.  HopWtr: All Benefits no Booze: use coupon code EEKC at checkout. 

It's been an amazing journey and we want to celebrate with you. Join us at the 100th episode special with Sanjay Poonen, COO, VMWare in conversation with Shreesha Ramdas, SVP & GM, Medallia Strikedeck, and our host, Kristen Hayer, Founder & CEO, The Success League as they talk about how to achieving customer-centricity through executive alignment.

Join us at a live event with Sanjay Poonen, COO, VMWare in conversation with Shreesha Ramdas, SVP & GM, Medallia Strikedeck and our host, Kristen Hayer, Founder & CEO, The Success League as they talk about achieving customer-centricity through executive alignment. Register here: https://medallia.zoom.us/webinar/register/3316222268642/WN_CbgFxh1nSfm9RuGmCJ2YVA

About SanjaySanjay Poonen is the former COO of VMware, where he was responsible for worldwide sales, services, support, marketing and alliances. He was also responsible for the Security strategy and business at VMware. Prior to SAP, Poonen held executive roles at SAP, Symantec, VERITAS and Informatica, and he began his career as a software engineer at Microsoft, followed by Apple. Poonen holds two patents as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he graduated a Baker Scholar; a master's degree in management science and engineering from Stanford University; and a bachelor's degree in computer science, math and engineering from Dartmouth College, where he graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.Links: VMware: https://www.vmware.com/ leadership values: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxkysDMBM0Q Twitter: https://twitter.com/spoonen LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjaypoonen/ spoonen@vmware.com: mailto:spoonen@vmware.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It’s an awesome approach. I’ve used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there’s more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It’s awesome. If you don’t do something like this, you’re likely to find out that you’ve gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It’s one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That’s canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I’m a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: Let’s be honest—the past year has been a nightmare for cloud financial management. The pandemic forced us to move workloads to the cloud sooner than anticipated, and we all know what that means—surprises on the cloud bill and headaches for anyone trying to figure out what caused them. The CloudLIVE 2021 virtual conference is your chance to connect with FinOps and cloud financial management practitioners and get a behind-the-scenes look into proven strategies that have helped organizations like yours adapt to the realities of the past year. Hosted by CloudHealth by VMware on May 20th, the CloudLIVE 2021 conference will be 100% virtual and 100% free to attend, so you have no excuses for missing out on this opportunity to connect with the cloud management community. Visit cloudlive.com/coreyto learn more and save your virtual seat today. That’s cloud-l-i-v-e.com/corey to register.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. I talk a lot about cloud in a variety of different contexts; this show is about the business of cloud. But, fundamentally, where cloud comes from was this novel concept, once upon a time, of virtualization. And that gave rise to a whole bunch of other things that later became, then containers, now it becomes Kubernetes, and if you want to go down the serverless path, you can.But it’s hard to think of a company that has had more impact on virtualization and that narrative than VMware. My guest today is Sanjay Poonen, Chief Operating Officer of VMware. Thank you for joining me.Sanjay: Thanks, Corey Quinn, it’s great to be with you and with your audience on this show.Corey: So, let’s start with the fun slash difficult questions. It’s easy to look at VMware as a way of virtualizing existing bare-metal workloads and moving those VMs around, but in many respects, that is perceived by some—ehem, ehem—to be something of a legacy model of cloud interaction where it solves the problem of on-premises, which is I’m really bad at running data centers so I’m just going to treat the cloud like a data center. And for some companies and some workloads, where, great, that’s fine. But isn’t that, I guess, a V1 vision of cloud, and if it is, why is VMware relevant to that?Sanjay: Great question, Corey. And I think it’s great to be straight up on a topic [unintelligible 00:02:01]. Yeah, I think you’re right. Listen, the ‘V’ in VMware is virtualization. The ‘VM’ is virtual machines.A lot of what is the underpinning of what made the private cloud, as we call it today, but the data center of the past successful was this virtualization technology. In the old days, people would send us electricity bills, before and after VMware, and how much they’re saving. So, this energy-saving concept of virtualization has been profound in the modernization of the data center and the advent of what’s called the private cloud. But as you looked at the public cloud innovate, whether it was AWS or even the SaaS applications—I mean, listen, the most popular capability initially on AWS was EC2 and S3, and the core of EC2 is virtualization. I think what we had to do, as this happened, was the foundation was certainly those services like EC2 and S3, but very quickly, the building phenomenon that attracted hundreds of thousands and I think now probably a few million customers to AWS was the large number of services, probably now 150, 200-odd services, that were built on top of that for everything from data, to AI, to a variety of other things that every year Andy Jassy and the team would build up.So, we had to make sure that over the course of the last, I’d say, certainly the last five to maybe eight years, we were becoming relevant to our customers that were a mix. There were customers who were large—I mean, we have about half a million customers—and in many cases, they have about 80, 90% of their workloads running on-prem and they want to move those workloads to the cloud, but they can’t just refactor and re-platform all of those apps that are running in the on-premise world. When they will try to do it by the end of the year—they may have 1000 applications—they got 10 done.Corey: Oh, and it’s not realistic and it’s unfair. I mean, there’s the idea of, “Oh, that’s legacy,” which is condescending engineering speak for it actually makes money because it’s been around for longer than six months. And sure you can have Twitter For Pets roll stuff out every day that you want; when you’re a bank, you have different constraints forced upon you. And I’m very sympathetic to folks who are in scenarios where they aren’t, for whatever reason, able to technically, culturally, or for regulatory reasons, be able to do continuous deployment of everything. I want to be very clear that I’ve in no way passing judgment on an entire sector of enterprise.Sanjay: But while that sector is important, there was also another sector starting to emerge: the Airbnbs, the Pinterests, the modern companies who may not need VMware at all as they’re building native, but may need some of our container in a new open-source capabilities. SaltStack was one of them; we will talk about that, I’m sure. So, we needed to be relevant to both customer communities because the Airbnbs of today, will be the Marriotts of tomorrow. So, we had to really rethink what is the future of VMware, what’s our existence in a public cloud phenomenon? That’s really what led to a complete watershed moment.I called publicly in the past sort of a Berlin Wall moment where Amazon and VMware were positioned pretty much as competitors for a long period of time when AWS was first started. Not that Andy was going around talking negatively about VMware, but I think people view these as two separate doors, and never the twain would meet. But when we decided to partner with them—I then quite frankly, the precursor to that was us divesting our public cloud strategy. We’d tried to build a competitive public cloud called vCloud Air between the period of 2012 and 2015, 2016—we had to reach an end of that movement, and catharsis of that, divest that asset, and it opened the door for a strategic partnership. But now we can go back to those customers and help them move their applications in a way that’s highly efficient, almost like a house on wheels, and then once it’s in that location in AWS—or one of the other public clouds—you can modernize it, too.So, then you get to both get the best of both worlds: get it into the public cloud, maybe retire some of your data centers if that’s what you want to do, and then modernize it with all the beautiful services. And that’s the best of both worlds. Now, if you have 1000 applications, you’re moving hundreds of them into the public cloud, and then using all of the powerful developer services on that VMware stack that’s built on the bare metal of AWS. So, we started out with AWS, but very quickly then, all the other public clouds, maybe the five or six that are named in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, came to us and said, “Well, if you’re doing that with AWS, would you consider doing that with us, too?”Corey: There’s definitely been an evolution of VMware. I mean, it’s in the name; you have the term VM sitting there. It’s easy to, at least from where I sit, think of, “Oh, VMware, back when running virtual machines was novel.” And there was a lot of skepticism around the idea. I’m going to level with you; I was a skeptic around virtualization. Then around cloud. Then around containers.And now I’m trying—all right I’m going to be in favor of serverless, which is almost certain to doom it because everything else that I’ve been skeptical of in this sense beyond any reasonable measure. So, there is this idea that VMs are this sort of old-school thinking. And that’s great if you have an existing workload that needs to be migrated, but there are a finite number of those in the world. As we turn towards net-new and greenfield build-outs, a lot of things are a lot more cloud-native than just hosting a bunch of—if you take the AWS example—EC2 instances hanging out in the network talking to other EC2 instances. Taking advantage of native offerings definitely seems to be on the rise. And there have been acquisitions that VMware has made. You talk about SaltStack, which was a great example, given that I wrote part of that very early on, and I don’t think the internet’s ever forgiven me for it. But also Bitnami—or BittenAMI, as I insist on pronouncing it—and you also acquired Wavefront. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that feels almost like a setting up a dichotomy of new VMware versus old VMware. What are the points of commonality there? What is the vision for the next 15 years of the company?Sanjay: Yeah, I think when we think about it, it’s very important that, first off, we acknowledge that our roots are what gives us sustenance because we have a large customer base that uses us. We have 80 million workloads running on that VMware infrastructure, formerly ESX, now vSphere. And that’s our heritage, and those customers are happy. In fact, they’re not, like, fleeing like birds into there, so we want to care for those customers.But we have to have a north star, like a magnet that pulls us into the modern world. And that’s been—you know, I talked about phase one was this really charting of the future of VMware for the cloud. Just as important has been focused on cloud-native and containers the last three, four years. So, we acquired Heptio. As you know, Heptio was founded by some of the inventors of Kubernetes who left Google, Joe Beda, and Craig McLuckie.And with that came a strong I would say relevancy, and trust to the Kubernetes, we’ve become one of the leading contributors to open-source Kubernetes. And that brain trust now, some of whom are at VMWare and many are in the community think of us very differently. And then we’ve supplemented that with many other moves that are much more cloud-native. You mentioned two or three of them: Bitnami, for that sort of marketplace; and then SaltStack for what we have been able to do in configuration management and infrastructure automation; Wavefront for container-based workloads. And we’re not done, and we think, listen, there will be many, many more things that the first 10, 15 years of VMware was very much about optimizing the private cloud, the next 10, 15 years could be optimizing for that app modernization cloud-native world.And we think that customers will want something that can work in a multi-cloud fashion. Now, multi-cloud for us is certainly private cloud and edge cloud, which may have very little to do with hardware that’s in the public cloud, but also AWS, Azure, and two or three other clouds. And if you think of each of these public clouds as mini skyscrapers—so AWS has 50 billion in revenue; I’m going to guess Azure is, like, 30, and then Google is I don’t know 12, 13; and then everyone else, and they’re all skyscrapers are different—it’s like, if we can be that company that fills the crevices between them with cement that’s valuable so that people can then build their houses on top of that, you’re probably not going to be best served with a container Stack that’s trapped to just one cloud. And then over time, you don’t have reasonable amount of flexibility if you choose to change that direction. Now, some people might say, “Listen, multi-cloud is—who cares about that?”But I think increasingly, we’re hearing from customers a desire to have more than just one cloud for a variety of reasons. They want to have options, portability, flexibility, negotiating price, in addition to their private cloud. So, it’s a two plus one, sometimes it might be a two plus two, meaning it’s a private cloud and the edge cloud. And I think VMware is a tremendous proposition to be that Switzerland-type company that’s relevant in a private cloud, one or two public clouds, and an edge cloud environment, Corey.Corey: Are you seeing folks having individual workloads that they want to flow from one cloud to another in a seamless way, or is it more aligned along an approach of having workload A lives in this cloud and workload B lives in this cloud? And you’re in a terrific position to opine on that more than most, given who you are.Sanjay: Yeah. We’re not yet as yet seeing these floating workloads that start here and move around, that’s—usually you build an application with purpose. Like, it sits here in this cloud and of course. But we’re seeing, increasingly, interest at customers’ not tethering it to proprietary services only. I mean, certainly, if you’re going to optimize it for AWS, you’re going to take advantage of EC2, S3, and then many of the, kind of, very capable [unintelligible 00:11:24], Aurora, there are others that might be there.But over time, especially the open-source movement that brings out open-source data services, open-source tooling, containers, all of that stuff, give ultimately customers the hope that certainly they should add economic value and developer productivity value, but they should also create some potential portability so that if in the future you wanted to make a change, you’re not bound to that cloud platform. And a particular cloud may not like us saying this, but that’s just the fact of how CIOs today are starting to think much more so as they build these up and as many of the other public clouds start to climb in functionality. Now, there are other use cases where particular SaaS applications of SaaS services are optimized for a particular [unintelligible 00:12:07], for example, Office 365, someone’s using a collaboration app, typically, there’s choices of one or two, you’re either using a G Suite and then it’s tied to Google, or it’s Office 365. But even there, we’re starting to see some nibbling around the edges. Just the phenomenon of Zoom; that wasn’t a capability that Microsoft brought very—and the services from Google, or Amazon, or Microsoft was just not as good as Zoom.And Zoom just took off and has become the leading video collaboration platform because they’re just simple, easy to use, and delightful. It doesn’t matter what infrastructure they run on, whether it’s AWS, I mean, now they’re running some of their workloads on Oracle. Who cares? It’s a SaaS service. So, I think increasingly, I think there will be a propensity towards SaaS applications over custom building. If I can buy it why would I want to build a video collaboration app myself internally, if I can buy it as a SaaS service from Zoom, or whoever have you?Corey: Oh, building it yourself would be ludicrous unless that was one of your core competencies.Sanjay: Exactly.Corey: And Zoom seems to have that on lock.Sanjay: Right. And so similarly, to the extent that I think IT folks can buy applications that are more SaaS than custom-built, or even on-prem, I mean, Salesforce—the success of Salesforce, and Workday, and Adobe, and then, of course, the smaller ones like Zoom, and Slack, and so on. So, it’s clear evidence that the world is going to move towards SaaS applications. But where you have to custom build an application because it’s very unique to your business or to something you need to very snap quickly together, I think there’s going to be increasingly a propensity towards using open-source types of tooling, or open-source platforms—Kubernetes being the best example of that—that then have some multi-cloud characteristics.Corey: In a similar note, I know that the term is apparently, at least this week on Twitter, being argued against, but what about cloud repatriation? A lot of noise has been made about people moving workloads from public cloud back to private cloud. And the example they always give is Dropbox moving its centralized storage service into an on-prem environment, and the second example is basically a pile of tumbleweeds because people don’t really have anything concrete to point at. Does that align with your experience? Is there a, I guess, a hidden wave of people doing a reverse cloud migration that just doesn’t get discussed?Sanjay: I think there’s a couple of phenomenons, Corey, that we watch here. Now, clearly a company of the scale of Dropbox has economics on data and storage, and I’ve talked to Drew and a variety of the folks there, as well as Box, on how they think about this because at that scale, they probably could get some advantages that I’m sure they’ve thought through in both the engineering and the cost. I mean, there’s both engineering optimization and costs that I’m sure Drew and the folks there are thinking through. But there’s a couple of phenomena that we do—I mean, if you go back to, I think, maybe three or four quarters ago, Brian Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America, I think in 2019, mid to late 2019 made a statement in his earnings call, he was asked, “How do you think about cloud?” And he said, “Listen, I can run a private cloud cheaper and better than any of the public clouds, and I save 240%,” if I remember the data right.Now, his private cloud and Bank of America is a key customer [unintelligible 00:15:04] of us, we find that some of the bigger companies at scale are able to either get hardware at really good pricing, are able to engineer—because they have hundreds of thousands—they’re almost mini VMware, right, [unintelligible 00:15:18] themselves because they’ve got so many engineers. They can do certain things that a company that doesn’t want to hire those many—companies, Pinterest, Airbnb may not do. So, there are customers who are going to basically say, even prior to repatriation, that the best opportunity is a private cloud. And in that place, we have to work with our private cloud partners, whether it’s Dell or others, to make sure that stack of hardware from them plus the software VMware in the containers on top of that is as competitive and is best cost of ownership, best ROI. Now, when you get to your second—your question around repatriation, what we have found in certain regions outside the US because of sovereign data, sovereign clouds, sometimes some distrust of some of those countries of the US public cloud, are they worried about them getting too big, fear by monopoly, all those types of things, lead certain countries outside the US to think about something that they would need that’s sovereign to their country.And the idea of sovereign data and sovereign clouds does lead those to then investing in local cloud providers. I mean, for example in France, there is a provider called OVH that’s kind of trying to do some of that. In China, there’s a whole bunch of them, obviously, Alibaba being the biggest. And I think that’s going to continue to be a phenomenon where there’s a [federated said 00:16:32], we have a cloud provider program with this 4000 cloud providers, Corey, who built their stack on VMware; we’ve got to feed them. Now, while they are an individual revenue way smaller than the public clouds were, but collectively, they represent a significant mass of where those countries want to run in a local cloud provider.And from our perspective, we spent years and years enabling that group to be successful. We don’t see any decline. In fact, that business for us has been growing. I would have thought that business would just completely decline with the hyperscalers. If anything, they’ve grown.So, there’s a little bit of the rising tide is helping all boats rise, so to speak. And the hyperscaler’s growth has also relied on many of these, sort of, sovereign clouds. So, there’s repatriation happening; I think those sovereign clouds will benefit some, and it could also be in some cases where customers will invest appropriately in private cloud. But I don’t see that—I think if anything, it’s going to be the public cloud growing, the private cloud, and edge cloud growing. And then some of these, sort of, country-specific sovereign clouds also growing. I don’t see this being in a huge threat to the public cloud phenomena that we’re in.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you've built anything from serverless, you know that if there's one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it's that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You've created more problems for yourself. Make one of them go away. To learn more, visit lumigo.io. Corey: I want to very clear, I think that there’s a common misconception that there’s this, somehow, ongoing fight between all the cloud providers, and all this cloud growth, and all this revenue is coming at the expense of other cloud providers. I think that it is simultaneously workloads that are being migrated from on-premises environments—yes—but a lot of it also feels like it’s net-new. It’s not just about increasingly capturing ever larger portions of the market but rather about the market itself expanding geometrically. For a long time, it felt like that was what tech was doing. Looking at the global IT spend numbers coming out of Gartner and other places, it seems like it’s certainly not slowing down. Does that align with your perception of it? Or are there clear winners and losers that are I guess, differentiating out?Sanjay: I think, Corey, you’re right. I think if you just use some of the data, the entire IT market, let’s just say it’s about $1 trillion, some estimates have it higher than that. Let’s break it down a little bit. Inside that 1 trillion market it is growing—I mean, obviously COVID, and GDP declined last year in calendar 2020 did affect overall IT, but I think let’s assume that we have some kind of U-shape or other kind of recovery, going into the second half of certainly into next year; technology should lead GDP in terms of its incline. But inside that trillion-dollar market, if you add up the SaaS market, it’s about $115 billion market.And these are companies like Salesforce, and Adobe, and Workday, and ServiceNow. You add them all up, and those are growing, I think the numbers were in the order of 15 or 20% in aggregate. But that SaaS market is [unintelligible 00:19:08]. And that’s growing, certainly faster than the on-prem applications market, just evidenced by the growth of those companies relative to on-premise investments in SAP or Oracle. And then if you look at the infrastructure market, it’s slightly bigger, it’s about $125 billion, growing slightly faster—20, 25%—and there you have the companies like AWS, Azure, and Google, and Alibaba, and whoever have you. And certainly, that growth is faster than some of the on-premise growth, but it’s not like the on-premise folks are declining. They’re growing at slower paces.Corey: It is harder to leave an on-premise environment running and rack up charges and blow out the bill that way, but it—not impossible, I suppose, but it’s harder to do than it is in public cloud. But I definitely agree that the growth rate surpasses what you would see if it were just people turning things on and forgetting to turn them off all the time.Sanjay: Yeah, and I think that phenomenon is a shift in spending where certainly last year we saw more spending in the cloud than on-premise. I think the on-premise vendors have a tremendous opportunity in front of them, which is to optimize every last dollar that is going to be spent in the data centers, private cloud. And between us and our partners like Dell and others, we’ve got to make sure we do that for our customer base that we’ve accumulated over last 10, 15 years. But there’s also a significant investment now moving to the edge. When I look at retailers, CPG companies—consumer packaged good companies—manufacturers, the conversation that I’m having with their C-level tech or business executives is all about putting compute in the stores.I mean, listen, what is the retailer concerned about? Fraud, and some of those other things, and empowering a quick self-service experience for a consumer who comes in and wants to check out of a Safeway or Walmart really quickly. These are just simple applications with local compute in the store, and the more that we can make that possible on top of almost like a nano data center or micro data center, running in the store with those applications resident there, talking—you know, you can’t just take all of that data, go back and forth to the cloud, but with resident services and capability right there, that’s a beautiful opportunity for the VMware and the Dells of the world. And that’s going to be a significant place where I think you’re going to see expansion of their focus. The Edge market today is I think, projected to be about $6 or $8 billion this year, and growing to $25 billion the next four or five years.So, much smaller than the previous numbers I shared—you know, $125, $115 billion for SaaS and IaaS—but I think the opportunity there, especially these industries that are federated: CPG, consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, retail, and logistics, too—you know, FedEx made a big announcement with VMware and Dell a few months ago about how they’re thinking about putting compute and local infrastructure at their distribution sites. I think this phenomenon, Corey, is going to happen in a number of different [unintelligible 00:21:48], and is a tremendous opportunity. Certainly, the public cloud vendors are trying to do that with Outposts and Azure Stack, but I think it does favor the on-premise vendors also having a very strong proposition for the edge cloud.Corey: I assumed that the whole discussion with FedEx started by someone dramatically misunderstanding what it meant to ship code to production.Sanjay: [laugh]. I mean, listen, at the end of the day, all of these folks who are in traditional industries are trying to hire world-class developers—like software companies—because all of them are becoming software companies. And I think the open-source movement, and all of these ways in which you have a software supply chain that’s more modernized, it’s affecting every company. So, I think if you went into the engineering product teams of Rob Carter, who runs technology for FedEx, you’ll find them and they may not have all of the sophistication as a world-class software company, but they’re getting increasingly very much digital in their focus of next generation. And same thing with UPS.I was talking to the CEO of UPS, we had her come and speak at our kickoff. It’s amazing how much her lingo—she was the former CFO of Home Depot—I felt like I was talking to a software executive, and this is the CEO of UPS, a logistics company. So, I think increasingly, every company is becoming a software company at their core. And you don’t need to necessarily know all the details of containers and virtualization, but you need to understand how software and digital transformation, how technology can power your digital transformation.Corey: One thing that I’ve noticed the more I get to talk to people doing different things in different roles was, at first I was excited because I get to talk to the people where they’re really doing it right and everything’s awesome. And I’ve increasingly of the opinion that those sites don’t actually exist. Everyone talks about the great thing is that they’re doing and aspirationally in certain areas in the terms of conference-ware, but you get down into the weeds, and everyone views their environment as being a burning tire fire of sadness and regret. Everyone thinks other people are doing it way better than they are. And in some cases they’re embarrassed about it, in some cases they’re open about it, but I feel like we’re still in the early days where no one is doing things in the quote-unquote, “Right ways,” but everyone thinks everyone else is.Sanjay: Yeah, I think, Corey, that’s absolutely right. We are very much early days in all of this phenomenon. I mean, listen, even the public cloud, Andy himself would say it’s [laugh]—he wouldn’t say it’s quite day one, but he would say it’s very early [unintelligible 00:24:03], even though they’ve had 15 years of incredible success and a $50 billion business. I would agree. And when you look at the customers and their persona—when I ask a CIO what percentage of—of an established company, not one of the modern ones who are built all cloud-native—but what percentage of your workloads are in a public cloud versus private cloud, the vast majority is still in a data center or private cloud.But with the intent—if it’s 90/10, let’s say 90 private 10—for that to become 70/30, 50/50. But very rarely do I hear a one of these large companies say it’s going to be 10/90 the opposite way in three, five years. Now, listen, I think every company as it grows that is more modern. I mean the Zooms of the world, the Modernas, the Airbnbs, as they get bigger and bigger, they represent a completely new phenomenon of how they are building applications that are all cloud-native. And the beautiful thing for me is just as a former engineering and developer, I mean, I grew up writing code in C, and C++ and then came BEA WebLogic, and IBM WebSphere, and [JGUI 00:25:04].And I was so excited for these frameworks. I’m not writing code, thankfully, anymore because it would create lots of problems if I did. But when I watched the phenomena, I think to myself, “Man, if I was a 22 year old entering the workforce now, it’s one of the most exciting times to write code and be a developer because what’s available to you, both in the combination of these cloud frameworks and open-source frameworks, is immense.” To be able to innovate much, much faster than we did 25, 30 years ago when I was a developer.Corey: It’s amazing there’s the pace of innovation, if cloud has changed nothing else, from my perspective, it’s been the idea that you can provision things without these hefty waiting periods. But I want to shift gears slightly because we’ve been talking about cloud for a bit in the context of infrastructure, and containers, and the rest, but if we start moving up the stack a little bit, that’s also considered cloud, which just seems to have that naming problem of namespace collision, just to confuse folks. But VMware is also active in this space, too. You’ve got things like Workspace ONE, you’ve got a bunch of other endpoint options as well that are focused on the security space. Is that aligned?Is that just sort of a different business unit? How does that, I guess, resonate between the various things that you folks do? Because it turns out, you’re kind of a big company, and it’s difficult to keep it all straight from an external perspective.Sanjay: Well, I think—listen, we’re roughly a little less than $12 billion in revenue last year. You can think of us in two buckets: everything in the first bucket is all that we talked about. Think of that as modernization of applications and cloud infrastructure, or what people might think about PaaS and IaaS without the underlying hardware; we’re not trying to build servers and storage and networking at the hardware level, you know, and so and so. But the software layer is about, that’s the first conversation we had for the last 15, 20 minutes. The second part of our business is where we’re touching end-users and infrastructure, and securing it.And we think that’s an important part because that also is something through software, and the cloud could be optimized. And we’ve had a long-standing digital workspace. In fact, when I came to VMware, it was the first business I was running in terms of all the products and end-user computing. And our thesis was many of the current tools, whether it’s the virtual desktop technology that people have from existing vendors, or even today, the security tools that they use is just too cumbersome. It’s too heavy.In many cases, people complain about the number of agents they have on their laptops, or the way in which they secure firewalls is too expensive and too many. We felt we could radically—VMware gets involved in problems where we can radically simplify thing with some disruptive innovation. And the idea was, first in the digital workspace was to radically reduce cost with software that was built for the cloud. And Workspace ONE and all of those things radically reduce the need for disparate technologies for virtual desktops, identity management, and endpoint management. We’ve done very well in that.We’re a leader in that segment, if you look at any of the analysts ratings, whether it’s Gardner or others. But security has been a more recent phenomenon where we felt like it leads us very quickly into securing those laptops because on those same laptops, you have antivirus, you have a variety of tools, and on the average, the CSOs, the Chief Security Officers tell me they have way too many agents, way too many consoles, way too many alerts, and if we could reduce that and have a single agent on a laptop, or maybe even agentless technology that secure this, that’s the Nirvana. And if you look at some of the recent things that have happened with SolarWinds, or Petya, WannaCry in the past, security’s of top concern, Corey, to boards. And the more that we could do to clean that up, I think we can emerge—which we’re already starting to—as a cybersecurity layer. So, that’s a smaller part of our business, but, I mean, it’s multi-billion now, and we think it’s a tremendous opportunity for us to take what we’re doing in workspace and security and make that a growth vector.So, I think both of these core areas, the cloud infrastructure, and modern applications—topic number one—workspace and security—topic number two—I’m both tremendous opportunities for VMware in our journey to grow from a $12 billion company to one day, hopefully, a $20 billion company.Corey: Would that we all had such problems, on some level. It’s really interesting seeing the evolution of companies going from relatively small companies and humble beginnings to these giant—I guess, I want to use the term Colossus, but I’m not sure if that’s insulting or [laugh] not—it’s phenomenal just to see the different areas of business that VMware has expanded into. I mean, I’ve had other folks from your org talking about what a Tanzu is or might be, so we aren’t even going to go down that rabbit hole due to time constraints at this point, but one thing that I do want to get into, slightly, has been a recurring theme in the show, which is where does the next generation of leaders come from? Where do the next generation engineers come from? And you’ve been devoting a bit of time to this. I think I saw one of your YouTube videos somewhat recently about your leadership values. Talk to me a little bit about that.Sanjay: Yeah. Corey, listen, I’m glad that we’re closing out this on some of the soft topics because I love talking to you, or other talented analysts and thought leaders around technology. It’s my roots; I’m a technical person at heart. I love technology. But I think the soft stuff is often the hard stuff.And the hard stuff is often the soft stuff. And what I mean by that is, when all this peels away, what your lasting legacy to the company are the people you invest in, the character you build. And, I mean, as an immigrant who came to this country, when I was 18 years old, $50 in my pocket, I was very fortunate to have a scholarship to go to a really nice University, Dartmouth College, to study computer science. I mean, I grew up in India and if it wasn’t for the opportunity to come here on a scholarship, I wouldn’t have [been here 00:30:32]. So, everything I consider a blessing and a learning opportunity where I’m looking at the advent of life as a growth mindset: what can I learn? And we all need to cultivate more and more aspects of that growth mindset where we move from being know-it-alls to learn-it-alls.And one of the key things that I talk about—and all of your listeners on this, listening to this, I welcome to go to YouTube and search Sanjay Poonen and leadership, it’s a 10-minute video—I’ll pick one of them. Most often as we get higher and higher in an organization, leaders tend to view things as a pyramid, and they’re kind of like this chief bird sitting at the top of the pyramid, and all these birds that are looking—below them on branches are looking up and all they see is crap falling down. Literally. That’s what happens when you look at the bird up. And our job as leaders is to invert that pyramid.And to actually think about the person who is on the front lines. In a software company, it’s an engineer and a sales rep. They are the folks on the frontline: they’re writing code or selling code. They are the true people who are making things happen. And when we as leaders look at ourselves as the bottom of the pyramid—some people call that, “Servant leadership.”Whatever way you call it, the phrase isn’t the point—the point is, invert that pyramid and to take obstacles out of people from the frontline. You really become not interested as much around what your own personal wellbeing, it’s about ensuring that those people in the middle layers and certainly at the leaf levels of the organization are enormously successful. Their success becomes your joy, and it becomes almost like a parent, right? I mean, Corey, you have kids; I’ve got kids. Imagine if you were a parent and you were jealous of your kid’s success.I mean, I want my three children, my daughter, my two children to do better than me, running races or whatever it is that they do. And I think as a leader, the more that we celebrate the successes of our teams and people, and our lasting legacy is not our own success; it’s what we have left behind, other people. I’ve say often there’s no success without successors. So, that mindset takes a lot of work because the natural tendency of the human mind and the human behavior is to be selfish and think about ourselves. But yeah, it’s a natural phenomenon.We’re born that way, we live in act that way, but the more that we start to create that, then taking that not just to our team, but also to the community allows us to build a better society. And that’s something I’m deeply passionate about, try to do my small piece for it, and in fact, I’m sometimes more excited about these topics of leadership than even technology.Corey: It feels like it’s the stuff that lasts; it has staying power. I could record a video now about technology choices and how to work with those technologies and unless it’s about Git, it’s probably not going to be too relevant in 10 years. But leadership is one of those eternal things where it’s, once you’ve experienced a certain level of success, you can really see what people do with that the people that I like to surround myself with, generally make it a point to send the elevator back down, so to speak.Sanjay: I agree, Corey, it’s—glad that you do it. I’m always looking for people that I can learn from, and it doesn’t matter where they are in society. I mean, I think you often—I mean, this is classic Dale Carnegie; one of the books that my dad gave to me at a young age that I encourage everyone to read, How to Win Friends and Influence People, talked about how you can detect a person’s character based on the way they treat the receptionist, or their assistants, the people who might be lower down the totem pole from them. And most often you have people who kiss up and kick down. And I think when you build an organization that’s that typical.A lot of companies are built that way where they kiss up and kick down, you actually have an inverted sense of values. And I think you have to go back to some of those old-school ways that Dale Carnegie or Steven Covey talked about because you don’t have to build a culture that’s obnoxious; you can build a company that’s both nice and competitive. It doesn’t mean that anything we’ve talked about for the last few minutes means that I’m any less competitive and I don’t want to beat the competition and win a deal. What you can do it nicely. And even that’s something that I’ve had to grow in.So, I think when we all look at ourselves as sculptures, work in progress, and we’re perfecting our craft, so to speak, both on the technical front, and the product front and customer relationship, but then also on the leadership and the personal growth front, we actually become both better people and then we also build better companies.Corey: And sometimes that’s really all that we can ask for. If people want to learn more about what you have to say and get your opinion on these things, okay can they find you?Sanjay: Listen, I’m very approachable. You can follow me on Twitter, I’m on LinkedIn [unintelligible 00:34:54], or my email spoonen@vmware.com. I’m out there.I read voraciously, and probably not as responsive, sometimes, but I try—certainly, customers will hear from me within 24 hours because I try to be very responsive to our customers. But you can connect with me on social media. And I’m honored to be on your show, Corey. I’ve been reading your stuff since it first came out, and then, obviously, a fan of the way you’re thinking about things. Sometimes I feel I need to correct your opinion, and some of that we did today. [laugh]. But you’ve been very—Corey: Oh, I would agree. I come out of this conversation with a different view of VMware than I went into it with. I’m being fully transparent on that.Sanjay: And you’ve helped us. I mean, quite frankly, your blogs and your focus on this and, like, is the V in VMware, like, a bad word? Is it legacy? It’s forced us to think, so I think it’s iron sharpens iron. I’m very delighted that we connected, I don’t know if it was a year or two years ago.And I’ve been a fan; I watch the stuff that you do at re:Invent, so keep going with what you’re doing. I think all of what you write and what you talk about is hopefully making an impact on people who read and listen. And look forward to continuing this dialogue, not just with me, but I think you’re talking to other people in VMware in the future. I’m not the smartest person at VMware, but I’m very fortunate to be [laugh] surrounded by many of them. So hopefully, you get to talk to them, also, in the near future.Corey: [laugh]. I will, of course, will put links to all that in the [show notes 00:36:11]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Sanjay: Thanks, Corey, and all the best of you and your organization.Corey: Sanjay Poonen, Chief Operating Officer of VMware, I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you’ve hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a condescending comment telling me that in fact, it is a best practice to ship your code to production via FedEx.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Today, cybercrime is a global challenge. A recent cybersecurity report estimates that by 2025, cybercrime will cost the world $10.5 trillion per year. It’s no surprise then that cybersecurity has become a major point of interest for organizations and individuals alike. Companies are starting to spend more on threat prevention tools and software, while individuals are trying to navigate the potential for cyberattacks in their digital lives. In today’s episode, we sat down with Sanjay Poonen, Chief Operations Officer of VMware. We provided Sanjay with real-life cybercrime stories from guests who have shared their experiences on our show. Using these examples, Sanjay helped us to discover the many defense strategies that we can use to prevent cybercrime in our everyday lives.

In this very special episode of Explain IT, Zac was joined by a very special guest, none other the VMware's COO, Sanjay Poonen, as well as Explain IT regular, Dean Gardner. This episode takes a broad look at some of the key challenges and trends in the industry today, including: the long lasting impacts of the pandemic on the industry and wider society, how technology will evolve over the next 5 years, and the many ways organisations can be a driving force for positive change. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Brother Sanjay Poonen

One of the most significant technology trends over the last decade is the shift of services and computing power to the cloud. COVID-19 accelerated these efforts as companies stood up remote work operations, business operations moved online, and government agencies scrambled to deliver services through digital channels. The underlying technology that supports these shifts and so much of what we experience online every day comes from a VMware. We're joined this week by the COO Sanjay Poonen where we discuss some of the insights they've learned over the last year, including the surge of telemedicine and how VMware helped Moderna with developing a lifesaving COVID vaccine. We also discuss cybersecurity and VMware's pledge to close the workforce gender gap by 2030.

Sanjay Poonen

The Dow closed down 40 points and Jim Cramer's breaking down today's action and some of the areas of opportunity he's seeing in the market. Then, Cramer's hearing about the future of the marijuana industry with Green Thumb Industries' CEO, Ben Kovler. And, what impact has the work-from-home movement had on VMWare? Cramer's talking to COO, Sanjay Poonen, to find out. Plus, Cramer's got the exclusive with AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron to hear more about the company's plans for the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For as long as Sanjay Poonen can remember, he’s been infatuated with teams. Whether it was the late Koby Bryant and his Los Angeles Lakers or Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, the idea of team success has consistently guided him from one point in life to the next. Today, Sanjay serves as the Chief Operating Officer of VMware, a company that employs more than 10,000 employees and is helping people unlock new opportunities through technology. On this episode of IT Visionaries, he discusses his love of teams as well as the importance of continual learning and how you can unlock your own opportunities within your company. 3 Key Takeaways There are many problems that can be solved with tech Great organizations are built off great team performance, not individual success It’s important to experience different roles within the company --- IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform

Hi, Spring fans! In this episode Josh Long (@starbuxman) talks to industry legend VMware COO Sanjay Poonen (@spoonen).

Sanjay Poonen preaches from Philippians 2:12

Sanjay Poonen is the Chief Operating Officer at VMware, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and digital workspace technology. They are the 5th largest software company and they currently have around 26,000 employees in offices around the world. Sanjay has been with VMware since 2013, prior to that he was President & Corporate Officer — Platform, Applications & Industries at SAP. He started his career as a software engineer at Microsoft followed by Apple. Technology today is advancing more rapidly than ever before, and it’s hard to tell what the world will look like 10–15 years from now. But Sanjay says some things will never change and as we progress we still need to make sure that we are training our children the fundamental principles of science, technology, engineering, math, logic, physics, etc…He also believes storytelling is an important skill for the future. He says, “I think it’s super important that we emphasize storytelling to our kids. And I hope that dinner table conversations are not obsessed by keeping the TV on and the device on. We try to keep a no device policy for a period of time in the evenings in our home. It’s super important we go back to that basic principle of what people did around the dinner table, which is telling stories.  And I hope that the classroom setting is the same time too. One of the dangers of this obsession with devices is that we move away from whatever friendship or family constructs that got people telling stories. I find often today, people are so obsessed with their devices, they’re not as good at carrying on a conversation, they’re looking down.” Technology can be used for great things and it can be used to make our lives easier. But we also have to be careful because it can also be used in dangerous ways as well. Sanjay explains that just as fire can be used for good (keeping us warm, cooking food, giving light) and bad (arson) technology can be used either way as well. For example, AI can be used to help doctors take more efficient, legible prescriptions via speech recognition technology rather than writing them out by hand. And it can be used in vehicles to help people park better or to drive more safely in heavy traffic.  But it can also be used in selfish or even evil ways. With facial recognition, there is a possibility that someone could be wrongfully identified and end up in trouble. Companies can sell data they have gathered from customers without permission. Because of these issues, Sanjay believes it is critical for technologists, leaders, and governments to constantly have conversations and debates in order to make technology a force for good. As a leader, how does Sanjay attract and retain the best talent? He says it starts with practicing servant leadership.  “It’s super important that you’re always humble and hungry, and looking to learn. And part of it, being a servant-leader doesn’t mean that you’re a doormat that everybody steps over. I’m strongly opinionated, I’m passionate, I’m a hard negotiator, all those things. But I don’t want any smell of me that I’m arrogant, unwilling to learn, unwilling to listen. I make plenty of mistakes, I’m a work in progress. But I want my team to feel like, “You know what, this guy’s got a growth mindset, so I can give him feedback. And I want the person who’s at the lowest rung of my organization to feel like I’m approachable, as opposed to sitting in some ivory tower with a bunch of security guards around me that they can’t come and talk to me or send an email to me or walk into my office. And I’m always challenging myself to how I could continue to drive that servant leadership mindset, both in myself, and role model it to my organization.” What you will learn: Sanjay’s general take on technology today The importance of leaders speaking up and taking a stance instead of staying neutral How to balance technology and humanity in the workplace How Sanjay brings in the best people and keeps them motivated The importance of storytelling Why Sanjay believes an A should be added to STEM to make it STEAM What technology freaks Sanjay out

SD-WAN 360 is live at Dell Technologies World 2019 and we are excited to introduce VMware's COO Sanjay Poonen.Sanjay joined VMware in August 2013, and is responsible for worldwide sales, services, alliances, marketing and communications.Question 1: You are very active on social media and a part of many tech communities within VMware (vEXpert , VMUG). Last week, I was amazed to see around 50 personalized videos in different VMUG locations. That is incredible. What are your thoughts on social media as tool to reach VMware’s customer base and your audience? Can you share any of your best practices? Question 2: Lets switch gears to talk about SD-WAN. VeloCloud, the start-up, was acquired by VMware in 2017. Has the original VMware leadership vision changed for SD-WAN since VeloCloud was acquired and became VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud? Where do you see SD-WAN heading? What are you hearing from VMware customers? Question 3: If I am a large enterprise customer, why do you think VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud is the right choice? Or let me put this way, if I am a huge Cisco shop today, why should I switch vendors and select VMware SD-WAN solution? Question 4: How do you see the relationship with Dell impacting the value of VMware SD-WAN to enterprise and service provider customers? Support the show (https://www.velocloud.com/sd-wan-resources/podcasts/sd-wan-360)

Work: it's where you spend 8 hours a day (or more!), 5 days a week (or more!). It’s what you talk about at parties. It’s how you introduce yourself. Our jobs often dictate the circumstances and rhythms of our lives. So why does Monday morning feel so far from Sunday morning? In our new series Made for Mondays, we'll discover what it looks like to go from simply working a job to fulfilling God’s unique mission for each of us. It all kicks off this Sunday with guest speaker Sanjay Poonen, who is living out his faith Monday through Friday as a COO at VMware.

In this podcast, I interview Sanjay Poonen. Sanjay is an Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at VMware. Previously at VMware, Sanjay held the role of Executive Vice President and General Manager for the End-User Computing business unit. Before VMware, Sanjay held executive roles at VMware, SAP, Symantec, Veritas, and Informatica, and he began his career as a software engineer at Microsoft and Apple. I hope you enjoy!

In this podcast, I talk to Sanjay Poonen about his career. Sanjay is an Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at VMware. Previously at VMware, Sanjay held the role of Executive Vice President and General Manager for the End-User Computing business unit. Before VMware, Sanjay held executive roles at VMware, SAP, Symantec, Veritas, and Informatica, and he began his career as a software engineer at Microsoft and Apple. I hope you enjoy!

Sanjay Poonen grew up lower-middle class in India and pushed past rejection to become one of the most respected executives in Silicon Valley; he's now chief operating officer at VMware. Jay Simons' detour before law school took him playing piano across Asia – and inspired him to ditch law for tech, where today he's president at Atlassian, one of the industry's hot young companies. For most of us, the path to success isn't going to be a straight line. But those who make it learn a lot of lessons you can't capture on a résumé. So what qualities separate the best from the average? I sat down with Poonen and Simons for the latest episode of the Fortt Knox Podcast, and the two executives shared some wisdom from their journeys that should help others along the way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast is Sanjay Poonen speaking about the Spirit-filled church.

Brian Katz talks with Sanjay Poonen (@spoonen) and John Marshall (AirWatch CEO) about VMware’s acquisition of AirWatch which was announced last week.

Enterprise mobility is an unstoppable force. By 2015, this game-changer could impact over 37% of the world's workforce - about 1.3 billion people. And by that time, 50% of enterprise mobility applications will be HTML5, predicts Sanjay Poonen, President & Corporate Officer, Technology & Innovation Products, Head of Mobile Division at SAP. He notes, “Mobile technology is creating both an expectation and impatience in people that never existed before. In fact, mobility has such an impact on companies today that conversations are no longer just between vendors and users, but really vendors and the end user.” ThinkJar's Esteban Kolsky agrees. “Mobile is not a fad. It has been building for over ten years as the next frontier for business. Now that it's finally here, we see businesses scrambling to catch up. Can they get there on time?” Join us to hear more about Enterprise Mobility: Faster, Please! p.s. Tune in Thursdays at 1 PM Pacific for In the Cloud with Game-Changers.

Enterprise mobility is an unstoppable force. By 2015, this game-changer could impact over 37% of the world's workforce - about 1.3 billion people. And by that time, 50% of enterprise mobility applications will be HTML5, predicts Sanjay Poonen, President & Corporate Officer, Technology & Innovation Products, Head of Mobile Division at SAP. He notes, “Mobile technology is creating both an expectation and impatience in people that never existed before. In fact, mobility has such an impact on companies today that conversations are no longer just between vendors and users, but really vendors and the end user.” ThinkJar's Esteban Kolsky agrees. “Mobile is not a fad. It has been building for over ten years as the next frontier for business. Now that it's finally here, we see businesses scrambling to catch up. Can they get there on time?” Join us to hear more about Enterprise Mobility: Faster, Please! p.s. Tune in Thursdays at 1 PM Pacific for In the Cloud with Game-Changers.