Don’t Break the Bank: Run IT, Change IT

Customer First, Customer Always with Sumit Dhawan

Episode Summary

In this episode of Don’t Break the Bank, we talk to Sumit Dhawan, President of VMware. Sumit explains the hows of meeting customer expectations and explains why that should be a company’s benchmark for success.

Episode Notes

Episode Notes

3 Takeaways:

• Spend lots of time with customers. That’s the best way to effectively communicate the services on offer and to get an honest barometer check on how well a customer’s needs are being met.
• Creating a broad, customer-focused definition of success motivates the entire organization to think about how and what needs to be done to ensure customers are satisfied. 
• When it comes to distributed enterprise and distributed workforce, the last thing you want is to go back to the mainframe closed days. Then you completely stop innovation because you're tying application development velocity straight into infrastructure. That’s never been healthy, and it never will be the right approach going forward.

Key Quotes: 

• "Customers are not necessarily looking for products and technologies. They're looking for partners themselves who are going to be able to take them into the future.” - Sumit
• “Software is about creating a vision, a destination, what I call a dream. Until customers see and envision the dream the same way as you do, and our teams fulfill that dream in a structured and methodical way, none of us are successful.”  - Sumit
• “Matching the solutions and then making [customers] successful is the core DNA and the job of sales, which is misunderstood until you've done it.” - Sumit

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Links

Sumit Dhawan LinkedIn

Sumit Dhawan Twitter

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About the Hosts

Matthew O'Neill is a husband, dad, geek and Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO at VMware.

You can find Matthew on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.

You can find Brian on LinkedIn.