News

Former Microsoft IT Exec Tony Scott Joins VMware as CIO

• By Gladys Rama
• August 27, 2013

Virtualization giant VMware has tapped former Microsoft chief information officer Tony Scott to be a senior vice president and its new CIO.

Scott will be responsible for VMware's global information technology group, according to an announcement Monday from the company. He will report to VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger

"Having a leader of Tony's caliber join VMware is an example of the talent we are attracting to what is already a world-class VMware team," Gelsinger said in a prepared statement. "Tony will have responsibility for advancing and protecting VMware information assets, leading a team that is helping VMware meet the IT needs of more than 500,000 customers worldwide."

Scott left Microsoft earlier this summer for personal reasons, he indicated in an e-mail to GeekWire confirming his departure from the company. Jim Dubois, Microsoft's vice president of IT product and services management, is currently serving as interim Microsoft CIO while the company searches for a permanent replacement.

Scott, whose background includes executive stints at The Walt Disney Co. and General Motors, joined Microsoft in 2008. Besides managing Microsoft's considerable IT department, one of Scott's key tasks was to "dog-food" -- that is, act as an early test customer of -- some of the company's major products and provide his input.

In this 2010 Q&A with Redmond magazine, Scott discussed the experience of dog-fooding Microsoft's then-nascent Windows Azure cloud platform.

"It's a very interesting time at Microsoft right now as we shift from our more traditional business model to the cloud. That has all kinds of implications, not just for customers -- who will end up buying different things from us -- but it also affects our internal systems. A lot of our internal systems were designed for the world of packaged software and traditional licenses," he said in the interview. "Now, with the cloud, we have an opportunity to sell different things -- services in particular. It's a different license model, different revenue model, a different set of things that we sell, so I have to change our internal systems to support that. But at the same time we're also putting those new systems on the cloud -- putting it on what we're going to sell."

VMware recently made a crop of product announcements at this year's VMworld conference, taking place in San Francisco this week. Among them, the company announced the general availability of the latest version of vCloud Suite, VMware's cloud infrastructure and management product; and vCloud Hybrid Service, VMware's public Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud offering.

Go here for a full report on the VMworld opening keynote from VirtualizationReview.com.