VMware Hiring Manager: David Bate, Vice President, Cloud, Asia Pacific & Japan

The Meet the Hiring Manager series allows you to get to know the people who grow teams at VMware. You will learn about VMware hiring managers’ career paths and what they look for in candidates during the interview experience. If learnings and interview tips from our hiring managers interest you, we invite you to read on!

This week we want you to meet Vice President of the Cloud team in Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ), David Bate. David is responsible for leading VMware’s Cloud sales and go-to-market efforts, launching and expanding VMware’s Cloud on AWS business, and accelerating the VMware Cloud Provider Program across the APJ region. Below you’ll find an excerpt from our recent chat with David.

David Bate

Asia Pacific & Japan

VMware Careers: Tell us about your career journey to date?

David Bate: Soon after graduating with an electrical engineering degree in New Zealand, I had my first taste of what it was like to work on a large, international, transformational project. My employer at the time sent me to live in Sydney for two years as a member of an international project team. I loved the work and I was hooked. Since that first experience, my territory has spanned the whole of Asia Pacific and my career has been spent working at the front of the technology adoption curve, helping clients to innovate and grow their businesses in new and creative ways. Along the way, I have had the very good fortune of being immersed in the rich diversity of the cultures that make up the Asia Pacific region. Prior to joining VMware, I spent the previous number of years selling on premise software solutions that more recently morphed into hybrid on premise/in the cloud solutions. When the possibility arose for me to lead VMware’s cloud business in APJ, I jumped at the opportunity. It was, for me, very much a case of choosing to be in the right company, with the right technology, at the right time in the market, at exactly the right time in my career.

VMware Careers: How is VMware different than any other tech company you have worked for?

David Bate:Despite celebrating its 20^thanniversarylast year, working for VMware is still very much like working for a 20-year-old Silicon Valley startup: at speed, with passion and commitment to success. It is the people that make it this way by bringing the company’s values to life and making it such a rewarding place to work. VMware genuinely ‘walks the talk’ of its EPIC₂(Execution, Passion, Integrity, Customers, Community)values. One of the points of difference that struck me when I joined VMware is its social conscience. Examples of this include Service Learning,where employees are encouraged to give back at least 40 hours a year to community projects, direct personal and company matched donations to charitable organizations of their choosing through the VMware Foundation, and VMware achieving carbon neutrality in 2018. “Tech for Good” is not just a catchy slogan. In VMware it under pins what we do.

VMware Careers: What has been the biggest lesson you have learned as you moved upwards in your career?

David Bate:Throughout my career change has been the constant and I have been the beneficiary of the opportunities that this change has created for me. A recent report published by Dell Technologies says that the rate of change is accelerating. So fast, in fact, that it is estimated that 85 per cent of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t even been invented yet. In this rapidly changing world, we all need to be learning in the moment and, to paraphrase the report, recognize that “the ability to gain new knowledge will be more valuable than the knowledge itself”. In this respect, the career shaping lessons that I have learned are to be a lifelong student, continually refreshing and updating my knowledge and to seize the opportunity to move to where the industry is moving to, not to where the industry is today or where it has been.

VMware Careers: Your teams are hiring across APJ. Can you tell us more about your organization’s charter?

David Bate:All of our clients have started consuming cloud services in one form or another. Although their reasons for this are varied, they are all looking to take advantage of the characteristics of cloud computing that enables their organizations to become more agile, to be able to innovate at speed and reduce the time to market of new product and service offerings for their customers.

The APJ Cloud Services team that I lead is tasked with working with our clients to accelerate their cloud adoption journey. We do this in two ways:

Through our VMware business partners enrolled into our VCPP program (VMware Cloud Provider Program). This program enables partners to consume VMware software on a pay-as-you-go, pay-as-you-grow, monthly subscription model. VMware Service Provider Partners offer hybrid cloud services that quickly and seamlessly extend their clients’ data centers into the cloud using the same VMware products and tools that they already use on premise.
with VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services(VMConAWS). VMC is a cloud offering jointly developed by AWS and VMware that delivers a highly scalable, secure and innovative platform that enables organizations to seamlessly migrate and extend their on-premises VMware environments to the AWS Cloud. VMC is ideal for clients looking to migrate their on-premises workloads to the public cloud, consolidate and extend their data center capacities, and optimize, simplify and modernize their disaster recovery solutions. VMC also brings to our clients the broad, diverse and rich functionality of AWS services natively to the enterprise applications running on VMware’s compute, storage and network virtualization platforms. This enables our clients to easily and rapidly add new innovation to their enterprise applications.

VMware Careers: If someone reading this was coming to an interview with you tomorrow what advice would you share with them?

David Bate:I consider an interview to be like a customer sales call, except that the product that a candidate is selling is themselves. To be successful in making the ‘sale’, a candidate needs to come to the interview well prepared and ready to demonstrate that they have the knowledge, expertise and temperament required for the role for which they have applied. An important part of this is an ability to demonstrate a sound appreciation of the VMware value proposition and being able articulate this in terms of business outcomes for their clients. In this regard candidates can help themselves by having done some research ahead of time. As the interview progresses, I like candidates to be ready to ask tough questions. This gives a candidate the opportunity to demonstrate their depth of understanding and knowledge of the market and the technology that we sell – and whether VMware is a good fit for them as an employee. In the context of treating an interview like a sales call, at the end of the interview, I like it when candidates ask for feedback whether they have answered the questions to my satisfaction and whether I will recommend moving forward with them as a candidate. In other words, asking for the order.

Take a look at some of the open positions for the APJ Cloud team below and apply today!