Ray O’Farrell joined VMware in April 2003 and currently serves as executive vice president and executive sponsor, leading the integration efforts of VMware’s expanded Cloud-Native Apps business unit. In this role, O’Farrell will envision and extend the company’s strategy and operating model for delivering the Kubernetes platform of the future.

Prior to August 2019, O’ Farrell served as executive vice president and chief technology officer, where his main focus areas was to ensure VMware’s long term technology leadership through research and innovation programs, with the primary goal of positively impacting and shaping the future of VMware, its ecosystem and its customers.

Prior to his role as Chief Technology Officer, O’Farrell co-led the Software-Defined Data Center Division comprising the vSphere, networking, management and storage businesses and was responsible for the division’s strategy, business and product planning and engineering execution.

O’Farrell joined VMware to lead the ESX Storage team during the early development of the ESX platform. He helped build a large ecosystem of partners in storage and helped expand the portfolio, which today includes products such as VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) and VMware vSAN. During his tenure at VMware, O’Farrell built and managed a global R&D organization and held engineering responsibilities across the entire VMware portfolio. His responsibilities spanned management of all of the components of VMware’s flagship vSphere and suite products, including core compute, networking, storage and Cloud management. O’Farrell also spearheaded the Dell Technologies IoT division.

O’Farrell has over 20 years of software engineering and product delivery experience. Before VMware, he developed and shipped development tools and operating systems for real-time, embedded and DSP systems at a number of companies including Industrial and Scientific Imaging (Ireland), Ashling Microsystems (Ireland), Improv Systems (United States) and Microtec/Mentor-Graphics (United States).

O’Farrell holds a bachelor’s of engineering in electronics and a master’s of engineering in computer science, both from the University of Limerick in Ireland.