Raghu Raghuram Named CEO of Cloud Computing and Virtualization Technology Company VMware
- The Indian American now joins an elite club of India-born executives, including Google’s Sundar Pichai, IBM’s Arvind Krishna, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen, who are heading global technology companies.
Cloud computing and virtualization technology company VMware has named top executive and company veteran Rangarajan (Raghu) Raghuram as the next chief executive officer. Raghuram, who is currently holding the position of executive vice president and COO, Products and Cloud Services, will also be a member of the Board of Directors, effective June 1. He now joins an elite club of India-born executives, including Google’s Sundar Pichai, IBM’s Arvind Krishna, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen, who are heading global technology companies.
Recently, VMware received the resignation of Sanjay Poonen, who served for seven years as the company’s CEO, Customer Operations.The company also named Sumit Dhawan as president, leading all go-to-market functions including worldwide sales, worldwide partner and commercial organization, Customer Experience and Success (CXS), marketing, and communications. Dhawan currently serves as VMware’s senior vice president and Chief Customer Officer.
Raghuram and Poonen were chief operating officers at VMware and both had been in the race for the top job, which fell vacant after former CEO Pat Gelsinger joined chip maker Intel as chief executive in January.
“VMware is uniquely poised to lead the multi-cloud computing era with an end-to-end software platform spanning clouds, the data center, and the edge, helping to accelerate our customers’ digital transformations,” Raghuram said.
Since joining VMware in 2003, Raghuram has helped steer the company’s strategic direction and its technology evolution. According to a company press release, Raghuram, “helped grow the core virtualization business, drove VMware’s software-defined data center strategy, constructed and guided VMware’s cloud computing business and SaaS transformation efforts, played a pivotal role in the company’s M&A strategy, and has been key in driving partnerships with Dell Technologies, hyper-scalers, and other strategic partners.
He has held multiple leadership roles, most recently leading the company’s software-defined data center business as the executive vice president and general manager, where he was responsible for the division’s strategy, business and product planning and engineering execution. Prior to that he led the company’s cloud infrastructure and management business as the general manager, and led worldwide product marketing, product management and business planning for VMware’s virtual infrastructure.
Prior to VMware, Raghuram held product management and marketing roles at AOL, Bang Networks and Netscape. Raghuram holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai.