VMware’s Sanjay Poonen Discusses Company’s Subscription Software Shift

When Sanjay Poonen joined VMware in 2013, the company was scrambling to adapt its traditional software business to a new world in which businesses were increasingly running software inside cloud data centers operated by Amazon, Microsoft and others. 

That shift could have been bad news for VMware, which is the dominant provider of software that lets businesses run applications more efficiently in their own private data centers. But seven years later, VMware has gotten out of competing directly with big cloud providers like Amazon and has instead formed partnerships with many of them. It has also made strides in selling more software through subscriptions, a move aimed at delivering more consistent quarterly revenue.