News

VMware COO Becomes Latest Exec to Resign

Carl Eschenbach is leaving to join a venture capital firm.

• By Keith Ward
• 03/01/2016

Another high-ranking VMware executive is leaving the company. Carl Eschenbach, VMware's president and chief operating officer, has resigned "to pursue a new career opportunity," according to a press release.

Eschenbach, who has been with VMware 14 years, is joining venture capital firm Sequoia Capital as a partner, Fortune magazine is reporting.

Eschenbach's duties won't be replaced by a single executive, but will instead be divided among four other executives: Maurizio Carli, Peter McKay, Ray O'Farrell and Sanjay Poonen.

Eschenbach becomes just the latest senior executive to exit VMware, joining among others former CFO Jonathan Chadwick, who announced his departure during the same January 2016 earnings call that VMware announced it was laying off 800 employees. Chadwick's place was taken by Zane Rowe. In a bit of irony, Rowe officially takes over from Chadwick today.

"With the executive changes we are making today, as well as the recent addition of Zane Rowe as our new CFO, we are well positioned to continue helping our customers transition to the mobile-cloud era," CEO Pat Gelsinger said in the press release.

Eschenbach is the second VMware exec to leave for a VC firm in as many weeks. Last week it was announced that Martin Casado, who headed VMware's crucial NSX business unit, was leaving to join Andreessen Horowitz as a General Partner. NSX is VMware's software-defined networking (SDN) technology that is at the heart of much of the company's goal of creating the software-defined datacenter (SDDC).

It isn't known whether the executive exodus is related to the pending purchase of VMware parent company EMC by Dell. The announcement of that purchase, expected to happen this summer if certain hurdles can be cleared, has certainly preceded a great deal of activity within the virtualization giant. It's impossible to connect the dots between the activity and the Dell deal, but the timing is, if nothing else, curious.