Former Sun MD joins VMWare

VMWare has recruited Sun Microsystem's former ANZ managing director, Duncan Bennet, to head up its commercial sales operations.

In the newly created director of commercial sales position, Bennet would be responsible for leading 20 staff across VMWare's commercial and telesales operations.

"I was attracted to the organisation," he told iTnews, declining to comment on why he left Sun in February 2009. "I'm at VMWare; the rest is old news."

VMWare also has appointed a new local director of enterprise sales, Steve Coad, who had been employed at IBM, EMC and Cisco in senior sales roles.

Coad replaced Ed Lenta, who had been promoted to a position in Singapore, and was to be responsible for VMWare's largest 70 accounts in ANZ.

"We made him an offer he couldn't refuse," said the company's ANZ managing director Paul Harapin of attracting Coad from IBM.

"We're like the Mafia here," he joked.

Bennet and Coad would be peers to VMWare's partner organisation director Fred King, and report to Harapin, who expected the hires to position VMWare for growth as market shook off effects of the economic downturn.

In 2010, Harapin said VMWare would focus on the market for IT as a Service, including rolling out private cloud infrastructure for organisations and providing public cloud infrastructure through service provider partners.

"As we drive the benefits of virtualisation and IT as a Service deeper into businesses, we will benefit from the insight these industry veterans bring to VMware," he said.

"I'm looking forward to working with both Duncan and Steve to take our ANZ business to the next level of maturity."