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VMware appoints development chief as new CTO

Veteran Ray O'Farrell to run Virtzilla's CTO office and development efforts

Imagine for a moment that you're a top-tier enterprise vendor and a week before your big annual conference, the one at which you try to impress the pants off the world, your chief technology officer (CTO) departs.

They guy had about a zillion meetings lined up, with all sorts of important folks you were counting on impressing. And extracting cheques from. You can't cancel those meetings. Or juggle other senior executives' schedules to cover because they're meeting important people too. Nor is it an option to fob those important people off with a minor functionary.

What to do, dear readers? What to do?

If you're VMware and your CTO bails suddenly, you make another very senior technologist your CTO by making your current chief development officer (CDO) do double duty as your CTO.

Ray O'Farrell is therefore going to have an even busier VMworld that he first thought, as he'll be wearing the CTO and CDO hats at the shindig.

The new hat-juggler was, until earlier this week, general manager for Virtzilla's software-defined data center division, so is therefore across most of its core products. The combined gig means O'Farrell will be responsible for “for orchestration across all of VMware's R&D Business Units and will lead VMware's CTO team”. He's got the CV for both gigs as he's been at VMware since 2003 and has worked on most of the company's products in the time since.

Plenty of CTOs The Reg encounters are more evangelists than technologists. VMware appears to be hoping long experience in the latter category translates into a good shot at the former. ®

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