After a great two-and-a-half years at VMware, I am casting off for new adventures.
At VMware, we dramatically changed the platform-as-a-service landscape with Cloud Foundry. You just don’t hear people talking any more about a single language or framework dominating the cloud. And the public cloud/private cloud debate is not question of “or”, but rather “and”. The premises of multi-framework, multi-application service and multi-cloud were heretical at launch, but now even the most diehard and recalcitrant have embraced “and” as a way of life. As a result, Cloud Foundry is winning the ecosystem race.
Developers, particularly in the enterprise, are inexorably moving up the stack in terms of platform abstraction and away from managing underlying plumbing to focus on their applications code (from DevOps to NoOps). Cloud Foundry makes it so much faster and easier to build, deploy and scale applications, while preserving deployment choice and flexibility, both today and into the future.
It was a blast working with a world-class engineering to launch Cloud Foundry as well as building a truly polyglot developer relations team. With the new corporate structure of the Pivotal Initiative, Cloud Foundry is well positioned to become the cloud application platform of choice. I wish the team the best of luck and will be following their progress closely.
While I am very bullish on Cloud Foundry and the Pivotal Initiative, I ultimately decided I have other things I want to do. In particular, I want to get closer to more nascent technologies and earlier stage businesses. My near-term plans are threefold. First, I will do some strategy consulting for a select group of clients under the newly formed aegis of Platformonomics, LLC. Second, I will continue working with my portfolio of startups, primarily in the Seattle area, where I invest, advise, mentor and sit on the odd board. And finally, I have a set of “over the horizon” topics of interest to dig into and will share some of that exploration here. Stay tuned.
