Established in 2001, RADIO stands for R&D Innovation Off-Site and has since gained immense popularity and significance for our people, with a record number of submissions this year. Running across three days, this event allows our community to connect, learn, and get inspired to imagine the future.
We asked two VMware Engineers, Thea Rossman and Shruti Bist, to share their key takeaways and learnings from VMware’s annual RADIO event in San Francisco last week.
Thea Rossman, member of technical staff (Engineer) on the datapath team at NSX. Thea focuses on performance and usability and joined VMWare in 2022.
VMware Careers: Thea, share your top three innovation takeaways from RADIO 2023:
Thea: There were so many – this is a tough one! The three I’ve chosen are as follows.
- Advancements in modern applications (including AI), continue to require advancements in the underlying infrastructures that enable them. One of VMWare’s strengths has always been in systems innovation, and there is still so much work to do in this area!
- The climate crisis, new regulations, pressures to reduce facility costs, and increasing carbon demands of modern applications, means that we must prioritize sustainability in our software. VMware’s contributions to virtualization have facilitated resource efficiency (e.g., strategic workload placement and consolidation); we will continue to innovate and deliver in this area.
- Expanding my definition of innovation! I often think of innovation only as brand-new research and patents; RADIO reminded me that innovation also means effective collaboration, product integration, and incremental improvements that deliver customer value.
VMware Careers: What was your standout moment from RADIO 2023?
Thea: Meeting Sujata Banerjee, VMware’s VP of Research, and speaking with her about a paper that I contributed to (which she later shouted out during her mainstage panel)! As a woman building my career in software-defined networking, I have looked to her as a role model and have admired her ground-breaking research since I joined VMware.
Shruti Bist, Senior Technical Program Manager with the Product Security Engineering team in VMware Platform Services (VPS) group. Shruti joined VMware in April 2021.
VMware Careers: Shruti, share your top three innovation takeaways from RADIO 2023:
Shruti: My top three innovation takeaways are;
- Tap the opportunities in GenAI and ML space and develop products responsibly
- Improve how we build and consume products and services internally through InnerSource
- Innovate by identifying improvement opportunities within our existing product portfolio for customers
VMware Careers: What was your standout moment from RADIO 2023?
Shruti: The standout moment is hard to pick because there were many, but I have chosen two. First, the research keynote with Speaker Margaret Mitchell (Chief Ethics Scientist at Hugging Face) stood out the most to me. Building ethics-informed GenAI and ML technology in our products is of utmost importance as the industry tries to adapt to this innovation.
Secondly, the research talks, practitioners, Birds of Feathers, and BU Booths were all important for VMware employees to know the kind of innovation the company is doing and the opportunities we have to collaborate internally.
RADIO is a celebration of everything that makes our products, team, and company special. We are already looking forward to next year’s event!
Read more about RADIO 2023 from Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Kit Colbert here.
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