VMware CTO Herrod leaves to join VC firm

VMware CTO Steve Herrod announced he is leaving his post at VMware as CTO and senior vice president of research and development to join venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners in its Palo Alto office, where he will become a partner and managing director investing in and supporting early-stage enterprise companies.

Herrod, who has been named CTO of the Year by InfoWorld, played a pivotal role in the creation and development of virtualization technology. At VMware, he was instrumental in helping the company build a world-class engineering organization that has created numerous industry-changing virtualization technologies. He was also active in developing VMware’s partner ecosystem, patent portfolio, and open source strategy.

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A VMware community fan favorite and one of the more visible, accessible executives at VMware, Herrod will be missed by many after his 11-year tenure with the virtualization giant. The move leaves VMware with big shoes to fill. With his departure, VMware also loses a powerful evangelist for the company’s technology.

Reaching out to his community base, Herrod spilled the beans about his departure with a quick tweet to his followers, simply saying: “After 11 awesome years at @VMware, off to a new adventure at General Catalyst (@gcvp). Exciting and emotional!”

This tweet was followed up with emotional responses from Herrod’s many followers.

His tweet also took people to what will perhaps be his final post on the VMware “Office of the CTO” corporate blog site, where he announced further details about his departure.

For more than 11 years, I have had the privilege of sharing details about the remarkable products, people, partnerships, and strategies that make up the VMware family. I have shared these via this blog, at our VMworld or vForum events, on twitter, in 1-on-1 discussions, or with my many friends in the VMUG, vExpert, PTAB, and other technical groups. I have enjoyed these interactions immensely and learned so much from my time in this role. And so today it is with both excitement and sadness that I announce my transition from VMware to a new adventure as managing director at General Catalyst, a premier venture capital firm jointly based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Palo Alto, California.

In the same blog post, Herrod discussed how virtualization has evolved over the last decade:

I am amazed by the changes our industry has undergone over the last decade. Virtualization has become the default technology upon which the majority of the world’s server applications run. What’s more, virtualization’s impact is rapidly extending into storage, networking, security, and every other aspect of the modern datacenter. The resulting “software-defined datacenter” is clearly the architecture of the future, enabling the efficient private, public, and hybrid clouds that are becoming part of every company’s IT strategy.

With changes at the CEO position recently, where former CEO Paul Maritz returned to EMC and former EMC executive Pat Gelsinger took the reins at VMware, the company seems to be focusing its energies once again on its core principles of servers and virtualization. That may not be the optimal place for Herrod to express his talents.

Herrod, as the former head of R&D at VMware, helped push the company forward with interesting technologies designed to help shake things up like SpringSource, Cloud Foundry, Horizon Suite, and the Zimbra collection. Now, he can position those talents within the VC community to continue to push the envelope and expand that vision into the next generation by supporting up-and-coming businesses.

“My primary focus will be finding, supporting, and developing great technical entrepreneurs as they build the products and companies that they’ve always dreamt of building,” said Herrod. “These companies will bring the same tremendous energy, creativity, and innovation to these and other challenges, just as VMware has for so many years.”

VMware hasn’t named a successor yet. But a spokesperson said the company is looking at both internal and external candidates for a replacement. For now, it sounds as if Herrod will still be helping VMware out in some capacity, saying he will have an ongoing role as a technical adviser with the company.

This article, “VMware CTO Herrod leaves to join VC firm,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com.