SAN FRANCISCO, California—During Tuesday's keynote address at VMworld, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger took to the stage to announce that Greg Lavender is now the company's CTO.
Lavender is the fourth CTO of VMware, which was founded in 1998. Lavender is stepping into the CTO role due former CTO Ray O’Farrell assuming responsibility for leading VMware’s cloud-native apps business unit. Lavender was previously senior vice president and CTO, cloud architecture, for VMware.
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Kubernetes has been the main theme at VMworld this week, which included the announcement of VMware's Kubernetes-based Tanzu platform and the integration of Pivotal into VMware once that deal closes. VMware was already working with Pivotal on Kubernetes through the jointly developed PKS.
"You've heard us say how important Kubernetes is for us," Gelsinger said. "The Tanzu strategy that will play out, this Pivotal merger that we're working on, and I couldn't think of a better, more capable leader to bring these capabilities than our 16 year veteran that has done products and code and now CTO for five years. It's my pleasure to announce Ray O’Farrell as our leader of our cloud-native efforts going forward. "
Before being named CTO, O’Farrell was general manager of the software-defined data center division. He also was senior vice president of R&D for cloud infrastructure and held previous R&D positions at VMware.
Lavender, who joined VMware in 2018, has more than 35 years of experience in software and hardware product engineering and advanced research and development in industry research labs and academia.
Prior to VMware, he was managing director and CTO for cloud architecture and technology engineering at Citigroup. Prior to Citigroup, Lavender held engineering leadership positions at Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems.