Authors

Rupak Acharjee, Senior Application Administrator, VMware

Rupak Acharjee is a Senior Application Administrator for VMware’s IT Application Operations team. He has 12 years of IT experience and has worked at VMware IT for more than 6 years. He is responsible for ETL, Control-M, IDR,  and Big Data applications, including supporting mission-critical VMware production systems and various projects.

Gopinath Anantharaman, Senior Director, R&D, VMware

Gopinath Anantharaman manages a global team that is responsible for SaaS IT back-office application delivery and works closely with the Cloud Services Platform (CSP) teams. He has held a number of leadership roles within the Business IT group. He has a strong track record of delivering key customer-facing portals, enterprise application integrations, and secure SSO solutions and is a key contributor to Business IT’s DevOps and Cloud-Native Application journey.

Josh Burton, Director, Global Audio and Visual (AV) and Events, VMware

Josh Burton is responsible for creating and managing audio-visual experiences. AV teams under Josh’s leadership support thousands of meetings and events each year at VMware offices worldwide. Prior to VMware, Josh led AV design, engineering, and deployment teams at both Symantec and eBay, after spending many years managing live events for various major music and entertainment groups. He holds a Masters in Entertainment Business from Full Sail University and a Bachelor’s in Business from Southeastern University.

Alfred Cheung, Lead Cloud Infrastructure Administrator, VMware

Alfred Cheung is responsible for the design, deploy and management of the Corporate IT private cloud compute and storage infrastructure, build and support for IT disaster & application resiliency. Prior to joining VMware, Alfred held various positions at Intuit and Allied Telesis. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Cal State University, Hayward.

Chanh Chi, Senior Director, Engineering, VMware

Chanh Chi joined VMware in April 2007 with a focus on supporting VMware’s business and customer-facing applications that require the highest level of availability. He currently leads VMware IT’s Production Cloud Infrastructure team that spans multiple countries around the world.  His team is responsible for managing the operating systems, compute, and storage infrastructure as well as the backups and disaster recovery protection behind VMware’s mission-critical services. His team also manages VMware’s internal Horizon VDI implementation.

Jason Conyard, Chief Information Officer, VMware

Jason Conyard is the CIO at VMware. He joined in July 2015 and starting in October 2020, he leads its global information and technology organization, a group that manages critical technology systems supporting the company’s worldwide business operations.  He is passionate about driving the Digital Strategy for VMware and its customers in close partnership across the company.  A respected industry veteran, Conyard brings more than 25 years of experience in executing and driving change in global technology companies. Prior to joining VMware, Conyard served as vice president, IT at Juniper Networks and Managing Director for BlackRock (formerly Barclays Global Investors).

Orlando Diaz, Director, VMware Information Systems

Orlando Diaz is responsible for the management of all devices utilizing Workspace ONE UEM.  He has been a Sr. Manager with VMware Information Systems for more than five years. Prior to his current position, he served a tenure as an IT Operations Manager and a Lead Server Engineer for AirWatch by VMware (now Workspace ONE UEM and Mobility). He has also held various positions at Hewlett-Packard, ThyssenKrupp, and the U.S. Army.

Brad Doctor, Senior Director, Information Security, VMware

Brad Doctor is an innovative information security leader with over 10 issued patents and many years of professional InfoSec experience spanning multiple industries and technologies. At VMware, Mr. Doctor leads Security Architecture and Engineering for all areas of the company. Prior to VMware, Mr. Doctor led Security Engineering & Architecture at Centurylink including the R&D teams that launched Level 3’s global managed security and DDOS scrubbing offerings.

Hüseyin Dursun, VP of Engineering, VMware Engineering Services – VES

Hüseyin Dursun leads the VMware Engineering Services (VES) organization at VMware, where he has been driving engineering efficiency and transformation efforts across VMware. His teams deliver internal private and hybrid cloud solutions—along with engineering productivity tools—that are used for both on-premises and cloud services. Before VMware, he served tenure with both Oracle and Microsoft (where he was member of the early Azure team). He holds a BS in Mathematics and an MS in Computer Science.

Boney Francis, UCC Architect, VMware

Boney Francis is a TOGAF-certified Architect aligned with the Unified Communications and Collaboration team. He is responsible for designing, planning, and implementing enterprise-level projects and supporting the teams to Keep the Lights On. With 13 years of IT experience in Messaging and Email systems (including extensive knowledge of Office 365 and PowerShell scripting), he’s always keen to take up challenges and is passionate about delivering a delightful user experience.

 

Preethy G, Solutions Engineer, IT Infrastructure-Core Services,  VMware

Preethy G is a Solutions Engineer working on global projects such as NSX Advanced Load Balancer (formerly AVI Networks), NSX deployments, and migration to VMware Cloud on AWS. She is also responsible for advocating and implementing VMware solutions to help VMware IT meet business requirements—from inception to go-live. Preethy has been with VMware since 2015 and holdsseveral professional certifications, including a VMware Certified Professional (VCP).

Catherine Greenberg, Director, VMware on VMware, VMware

Catherine Greenberg leads the VMware on VMware Program.  The goals of the program are to deploy and test VMware products in our environments and provide feedback to R&D. We also partner closely with the field organization to share our product deployment journeys and thought leadership topics with Customers. Prior to VMware, Catherine worked at Microsoft in various IT roles including Mergers & Acquisitions and managing large-scale IT projects/programs.

Jerry M. Griffin, Senior Manager, Infrastructure Operations, VMware

Jerry Griffin is responsible for daily operational support of the engineering and remote office infrastructures within VMware IT. Past projects include implementation of EVO: SDDC within VMware Global Services, load balancing of the Engineering LDAP infrastructure, and Cloud Infrastructure and Engineering workload migrations. With more than 17 years of experience in IT, Jerry has held different roles within state and federal governments as well as non-profit organizations. Jerry also served nine years in the United States Air Force. He holds various certifications from VMware, Red Hat, SUSE, Novell, and Microsoft.

Stefan Grigorov, Information Systems Engineer, Colleague Experience and Technology (CET), VMware

With more than 10 years of experience in the industry, Stefan is responsible for all aspects of managing Windows endpoints in the company. Previous to VMware, he served a tenure as an Architect for DXC Technology and as an SCCM Architect with HP.

Swapnil Hendre, Director, Solutions Engineering and Design, VMware

Swapnil Hendre is a Director of Solutions Engineering and Design in VMware IT. He is responsible for leading solution architecture from inception to production for Public and Private Clouds in VMware IT. With more than 17 years of IT experience, Swapnil is also one of IT’s resident experts on the design and implementation of NSX micro-segmentation and VMware Cloud on AWS in IT’s Infrastructure and Cloud Operations. Previously, he has worked for Symantec, HP, CSC, and Nortel.

Jason Hutson, Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, VMware

Jason Hutson works on cloud productivity and engineering infrastructure environments. Prior to working for VMware, Jason served a tenure as CTO for Fetch, Technical Director for Moxy, and Director of Information Technology for VentureNet. He holds a Computer Information Systems degree from Herzing College.

Laxminarayan Jayabharthi (Laxmi J), Senior Director, IT Application Development, VMware

Laxmi J is responsible for managing the application integration platform and framework that connect islands of information between various business applications and supporting a long-term solution that is scalable, maintainable, and robust. He is also leading the team responsible for transforming Enterprise IT to evolve and adapt to next-generation IT using DevOps and DevSecOps. He joined VMware in 2006.

Jino Jose, Lead Applications Database Administrator, VMware

Jino Jose is responsible for the operations of various databases at VMware. He also has experience in managing stateful sets in Kubernetes, data center application migration, and working with various private cloud operations.

Romy Kaura, Senior Director IT Mergers & Acquisitions and Services, VMware

Romy Kaura is Senior Director of IT Mergers & Acquisitions and Services where he provides thought leadership to the IT M&A organization and transformed its execution to be “a well-oiled machine.” He has 20+ years of experience in IT delivery, digital transformation, DevOps, PMO, M&A, and divestitures. He is passionate about leveraging innovative technology to deliver value.

Raanan Kesar, Senior Director of SaaS Operations, VMware

Raanan Kesar joined VMware in 2010, and now leads SaaS Operations, a member of the Cloud and Productivity Engineering (CPE) org. He is also co-chair of the Production Readiness Assessment (PRA) program, and was previously was part of the CSP team operations,. Prior to joining VMware, he was with Mercury Interactive R&D (Application Performance Monitoring), Mercury Managed Services, and HP Software as a Service Operations.

Varinder Kumar, Senior Director, IT Applications Operations, VMware

Varinder Kumar joined VMware in 2008 and manages the global Application Operations team responsible for 24×7 availability of all corporate internal and external applications including SAP, Oracle, etc. He works closely with the application development and architecture teams to ensure that systems are designed with 100% resiliency. He has 20+ years of IT experience in improving the availability of key business applications and managing multiple ERPs, databases, cloud-native platforms, DevOps, and IT project delivery.

Gopala Krishna Sandur Kustigi, Lead Application Administrator, IT Application Operations, VMware

Gopala is currently a tech lead on various application integrations technologies and is responsible for setting up the Kubernetes platform and hosting the technologies for VMware IT Ops. He has more than 12 years of experience in IT and has worked at VMware for more than seven.

Jerry Li, Director, IT Applications Development, VMware

Jerry Li is a senior manager focusing on application release management, new technology adoption, and disaster recovery at VMware IT. His responsibilities span streamlining DevOps processes, improving service availability, and operating disaster recovery plans and testing for large-scale enterprise applications. Jerry also works with VMware product teams to improve the quality of the products as part of the VMware on VMware program.

Lyubomir Lyubenov, Senior Cloud Architect, VMware

Lyubomir Lyubenov is a Cloud Architect on the VMware Private Cloud team. He joined the VMware team in 2013 to work on large-scale infrastructure architecture leveraging VMWare’s SDDC products. With more than 15 years of experience in designing, implementing, and supporting large scale enterprise environments, he is helping VMware’s private cloud team to deliver various cloud services by utilizing VMware’s cloud management platforms.

Shamika Mukane, Lead Solutions Engineer, VMware

With more than five years experience, Shamika is currently leading projects such as global rollout for SD-WAN WFH Service and network segmentation, various multi-cloud initiatives, and the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (AVI) rollout—in addition to her contributions to automation of VMware products including NSX-T, VMware Cloud, and vSphere. She holds master’s degree in computer science and engineering from VIT University.

Vipin Nair, Manager, Global AV Engineering, VMware

Vipin is part of the team responsible for creating and managing the audio-visual experiences across all of VMware—supporting thousands of meetings and events each year at VMware offices worldwide. Prior to VMware, he was an associate and consultant for Hewshott International and a Senior Project Engineer for Bose Corporation. Vipin holds a Bachelor of Technology, Electronics and Communications Engineering from U.P. Technical University.

Jitendra Nath, Lead Applications Developer—IT Enterprise Integrations VMware

Jitendra possesses more than 15 years of proven experience in enterprise application integrations, analytics, cloud-native app design and development. Currently he is involved with architecting application integration between heterogeneous applications using various integration tools (iPaaS,open source) and techniques . He is also a Dell Boomi certified Professional Architect. Prior to joining VMware, Jitendra worked at Oracle and TCS.

Michelle McNeil, Senior Director, Strategic Operations, VMware

Michelle McNeil has worked in the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley for over 25 years.   She currently is a Senior Director of the Digital Transformation Program Management Office at VMware.  One of her roles is to manage the Global Crisis Management team to coordinate rapid response and resolution to major threats ranging from natural or other event-related disasters to cybersecurity.

Grant Nowell, IT Operations Director PMO & Compliance, VMware

Grant leads IT PMO, Change & Release Automation teams and brings 29+ years of experience in the IT industry. He has held various IT leadership positions at VMware, including tenures in DevOps, Applications Infrastructure Support, NOC Operations and End User Client Services.

Balaji Padmanaban, Senior Director, IT Applications, VMware

Balaji Padmanaban is responsible for IT back-office applications for VMware, including Oracle, SAP, and many other on-premises and cloud software applications. His team enables VMware to implement bottom line and topline impacting projects and programs across Finance, HR, Real Estate, and Legal. Balaji has held a number of leadership roles within the Business IT group over the last several years.

Lalit Parashari, IT Manager: DR / IT Infrastructure / App Ops, VMware

Lalit manages the design, implementation and communication of disaster recovery plans and processes that ensure the security and integrity of VMWare data, databases, information systems, and technology. He has more than 12 years of IT experience, including tenures at Tesco and Sonata Software Ltd.

Balaji Parthasarathy, Senior Director, IT Applications, VMware

Balaji Parthasarathy leads the VMware on VMware initiative for Business IT.  He is responsible for the continuous development/continuous integration (CD/CI) and DevOps agenda for Business IT. His team is responsible for the enterprise architecture and design for all key business domains and systems supporting VMware customer and business operations. Balaji is an accomplished IT leader with extensive experience in ERP and Entitlement Management domains. He has successfully launched, directed, and managed large-scale global IT projects/programs.

 

Mehul Patel, Senior Manager, IT Applications

Mehul Patel is responsible for strategy, framework, security, and operationalization of DevOps and DevSecOps practices. In this position, Mehul manages software-defined infrastructure provisioning, release platform enablement & automation, and identity/access management functions. Prior to this, Mehul managed and led teams in Application Integrations and Master Data Management, also at VMware.

 

Iliyan Petkov, Senior Cloud Site Reliability Engineer, VMware

Iliyan has served tenure with VMware for more than six years, responsible for maintaining and automating internal cloud offerings. Previous to VMware, he held various software and service support engineering positions with Siemens Enterprise Communications. Iliyan holds a master’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the Technical University Sofia.

Donald Philpott, Sr. Manager of Global Data Center Metro and Backbone IT, VMware

Donald is the Senior Manager for Global DC Metro & Backbone Network Operations. This function controls and maintains VMware’s Network Backbone globally. He has spent over 12 years working on the VMware Network Operations team in an engineering or management capacity. Prior to working for VMware, Donald held lead developer roles for Ericsson and Motorola where he led software development teams. He holds a Computer Software Engineer degree from University College Limerick [UL]

Curtis Pope, Director of VMware Learning Platform, VMware

Curtis helped found VLP seven years ago and has been an integral part of its growth. Previous to his current position, he served a tenure as an Americas vCloud Architect and Staff Systems Engineer with VMware, and as a Senior Systems Architect with IBM. Curtis holds a Bachelor’s in Science degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Pankaj Purwar, Director, IT Applications, VMware

Pankaj Purwar is a Director of Business IT at VMware and is responsible for leading IT enterprise applications for Master Data Management and Global Services functions. Pankaj brings over 20 years of experience across strategy, technology, and business transformation to deliver value and a delightful experience to customers. Prior to joining VMware, Pankaj was an IT Director at Juniper Networks.

Telmo Rodrigues, Sr. Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, VMware

Telmo focuses on global infrastructure, currently working on ePKS clusters deployment. He has been with VMware since 2010, and has had several roles including managing Horizon View and Workspace ONE.

 

Alex Romanenko, Staff Engineer, Cloud and Productivity Engineering (CPE) CloudOps, VMware

Alex has been with VMware since 2004, and is part of a team responsible for architecting, implementing, managing and supporting large internal clouds. He began his career in the Quality Assurance organization that was responsible for testing early versions of VMware products. He has also held positions in Technical Operations, Cloud Operations and R&D. Alex holds a Bachelor degree in Computer Science from San Jose State University.

Eric Rong, Technical Architect, VMware

Eric Rong is a Technical Architect on the Business IT team responsible for driving the Cloud-Native, DevOps transformation, and strategic project delivery from an architecture and technology perspective. Eric brings 20 years of experience in IT industry focus on technology and application architecture, with a strong track record in delivering key initiatives and projects. Prior to join VMware, Eric worked at Franklin Templeton and HP.

Dan Sanford, Information Systems Senior Engineer, VMware

Dan Sanford is a member of the VMware IT Airwatch team responsible for Apple server and client systems, including Apple system integration, wireless telecom, and Airwatch deployment and license management. He has more than 12 years of IT experience.

Craig Savage, Security Solutions Strategist —VMware Information Security, VMware

Craig is responsible for helping VMware customers in their Security transformation journey. Prior to his current position, he served a tenure as an Enterprise Architect, Security Architect and Governance, Risk and Compliance consultant with VMware in Europe, and companies such as Capgemini Consulting and Accenture. He has a background in psychology and human performance and holds certifications in CISSP-ISSMP and VCP-DV 6.7.

Ashu Saxena, Senior Cloud Infrastructure Administrator, VMware

Ashu Saxena is a Cloud Infrastructure Administrator responsible for the Linux infrastructure in VMware IT. He has 12 years of IT experience.

 

Sachin Sharma, Linux Systems Architect, VMware

Sachin Sharma is a Linux Systems Architect responsible for VMware’s IT Operations Layer 1 Infrastructure. He has 17 years of IT experience and has worked at VMware IT for more than five years.

Manas Singh, IT Manager, Application Platforms, VMware

Manas Singh is responsible for the design and implementation of application infrastructure for cloud-native applications. He spearheads the stability, availability, and roadmap initiatives for the platform. Java is his preferred language, and he has extensive experience in tuning Java-based applications. Prior to working at VMware, Manas was a Principal Consultant with Oracle where he designed Oracle Middleware Infrastructure based on Maximum Availability Architecture principles. Manas holds a master’s degree in Computer Applications.

Stephen Sheen, Senior Manager, IT PMO, VMware

Stephen has been with VMware for more than six years, and in his current position for nearly two. Prior to this role, he served a tenure as a Sr. Project Manager with IT Operations. He has also held various positions with Ezzoft Technologies and Lisec Software. Stephen holds a Bachelor’s in Technology, Electronics, and Communication Engineering, from Cochin University of Science and Technology.

Sukhjit Singh, Senior Network Systems Administrator, VMware

Sukhjit Singh is Network Systems Engineer responsible for load balancing performance. He has eight years of networking experience.

Pervinder Sudan, Lead Release Automation Engineer, VMware

Pervinder Sudan has been a Lead DevOps Engineer with VMware for more than seven years, responsible for developing and managing the DevOps platform leveraged by VMware Business IT to deploy hundreds of different types of artifacts on public & private cloud and on-premises applications. Prior to VMware, Pervinder was a Technical Manager with MindTree Ltd. and a Release Engineer/Manager with Vendavo, among other positions with Aztec Software and Quark House Media. He holds a Bachelor’s in Engineering (Computer Science) from Gulbarga University.

Aju Sukumaran, Information Systems Senior Manager, VMware

Aju Sukumaran leads the End User Services (EUS) client engineering team responsible for EUS IT engineering. He has 17 years of IT industry experience and has worked in various roles within VMWare IT. He has expertise in the Virtual Desktop & virtual application solutions.

Dane Tadsen, Information Systems Senior Engineer, VMware

Working with VMware for more than six years and with a focus on Workspace ONE UEM and Mobility (previously AirWatch), Dane is responsible for the mobile device experiences on iOS and Android. He holds a Bachelor’s in Science degree from the University of West Georgia.

Shane van Bentum, Director, Cloud Operations, VMware

Since joining VMware in 2010, Shane has worked in various IT Operations roles. His team is responsible for building and operating one of the largest VMware private clouds, one that supports millions of virtual machines across the globe. Shane is passionate about DevOps, and is a main driver for applying best practices—and establishing a DevOps mindset—to transform the organization via solving operational challenges for R & D teams through code.

Shaji Vayaveetil, Domain Architect, VMware

Shaji Vayaveetil is a TOGAF-certified Domain Architect working in IT Global Support Services (GSS) area. He’s responsible for designing critical applications like MyVmware.com as well as sustainable and futuristic applications for the VMware business. He’s been working at VMware for more than 10 years and was instrumental in implementing ERP solutions (Oracle EBS and SAP). He’s an active member of the VMware enterprise architecture team.

Sunder Vudhya, Director, IT, VMware

Sunder Vudhya manages a global team responsible for the SaaS and Perpetual IT back-office application delivery model. His team works closely with the various business organizations like the Global Order Operations and Global Pricing Operations & Cloud Services Platform (CSP) teams. He has been working at VMware for more than 10 years, has held a number of leadership roles within the Business IT group, and is TOGAF-certified.

Zaigui Wang, Director, Cloud Infrastructure Operations, VMware

Zaigui Wang is a senior manager of Cloud Infrastructure Operations at VMware IT. His team is responsible for planning, designing, and operating the virtualized infrastructure to support mission-critical VMware production systems, including ERP, web portals, enterprise collaboration, and data analytics. Running products to their full potential and sharing his knowledge with customers are his passions. Zaigui’s background includes system and storage administration for 15+ years.

Cy Whitfield, End-User Computing Engineer, VMware

Cy works within the Colleague Experience and Technology (CET) team. With more than 15 years in the tech industry, he is currently responsible for helping manage the Windows estate, app deployment, patching, and Out of Box Experience (OOBE) using factory provisioning.