Despite the turbulent winds of VMware's pending acquisition by Broadcom and recent headcount changes at the company, VMware employees are "very engaged" in helping the vendor do "what we can do to win," GM and SVP of VMware Modern Apps and Management Purnima Padmanabhan told SDxCentral.

Padmanabhan took over for Ajay Patel after his nine-year stint with VMware, whose exit was synched with executives Mark Lohmeyer and Tom Gillis. In an internal memo, VMware tied the trio's departure to Broadcom’s pending $69 billion acquisition of the vendor, noting the three executives were leaving for "new opportunities."

Padmanabhan, who headed up cloud management before the promotion, expected to face a good deal of cultural differences in her new role – even though "this was a smaller change compared to the constant Broadcom conversation that employees have," she said. "But net-net, when you start anchoring conversations based on the customer, and the customer needs, and what we can do to win, I've been incredibly pleasantly surprised by how teams have gone so fast," she explained.

VMware Chases Its North Star

The key driver of that engagement is what Padmanabhan describes as a north star goal: a "powerful" market opportunity founded in VMware's ability to connect to enterprise customer outcomes. When working on low-level infrastructure technology, teams might feel like their work doesn't quite connect to reality. But with the vendor's modern applications and management teams, for example, their work "viscerally connects to customer outcomes," she argued.

Padmanabhan cited a sporting goods retail enterprise that was able to deploy a curbside pickup application in just over a week, and a telecom company that reduced its time to respond to security events to a few hours. "That is transformation," she said. "That's app acceleration and keeping customers secure."

Stories like those connect people, she said, but they also "connect employees because they feel they're part of a broader mission," she said. And that mission isn't just writing a few disparate pieces of enterprise code; it's "fundamentally transforming literacy, helping the banking industry transform, helping the healthcare industry deal with crisis, and so on," she said.

Knowing what she does today – that her team is both ready and strong – Padmanabhan said she would have been more open with them about her opinions, thoughts, and concerns right from the beginning. "I was trying to shield the team a little bit from changes with the fear [of] how the team would react," she said.

If a functioning time machine landed on her desk, for example, she would go back and start building the trust she now enjoys with her team by being more vocal about her framework and her concerns about the true size of the vendor's market opportunity. "I'm gonna go and talk to customers, but then come back and tell [the team] this is what I heard. So the trust that we build now with the team, I would have done it much faster," she explained.

"When you share the positive and negative openly, but with a north star, everybody rises to the occasion to say, okay, here's how we solve it. You want to engage everybody, and now we're doing that," Padmanabhan added.