“The Attic” Video Podcast Episode 10: Skip Gumble on VMware’s Future and where EUC is headed

We recently had the pleasure of talking with Skip Gumble on The Attic during our DISRUPT tour. Skip is Horizon Cloud Services Senior Director at VMware and has global responsibility for driving the end user computing business including virtual applications and desktops. Skip reveals how he started out in sales and systems engineering hardware positions and then saw software and EUC as the future, eventually joining VMware, where he is celebrating his tenth anniversary.

Long before ‘arm’ became a tech word, Skip had an arm, a good one, that made him a stellar third baseman and pitcher at Lovett High School in his hometown of Atlanta. Lovett was serendipitous. They offered an independent study type program during his sophomore year, and Skip chose computer technology. He was able to tinker with the HP 2000 and soon he and a friend realized the computer had no programs. They started writing software and wrote the accounts receivable and payable systems for the school. Skip earned money doing software through high school and used the money to help pay for tuition at Southern Methodist University. He graduated with degrees in computer science and business, earning money in a work-study program with Data General.

Skip began his post-college career at HP where he got the first hint of what end user computing would be today. HP was selling transactional based systems and dealing with end users needing access to information. He then moved to 3Com, and after a total 20 years in hardware he was ready to move back to software.

IGEL and Skip began their friendship and EUC alliance, circa 2008, when he was doing a brief stint at Citrix before spending one year at Dell, then moving to VMware. Good fortune struck when Susan Nash, a former HP colleague, invited Skip to join their VDI and Horizon team at VMware.

Skip says one of the best things about VMware and IGEL’s partnership is both are very focused on driving innovation to help their customers. He sees perfect synergy with VMware in IGEL software’s ability to help the customer gain access anywhere on any device.

Tune in and hear Skip talk about VMware’s merger with Broadcom and how he views the merging working, as well as his take on end user computing’s continued evolution. And discover what Skip’s mom learned about him during the pandemic!

On Why In-Person Still Matters. “…it’s really important to reconnect with everybody in person. …the amount of information and dialog that we can now have with our customers is so much more rich than we could ever have on Zoom.”

On Nurturing Collaboration. “One of the goals we have as a team is to get together in fun places every six months or so. …It is important to go in the office and have a collaboration session. When I go into corporate they schedule meetings with each other as well with me. So, I’m a catalyst to get people to come back and collaborate.”

On End User Compute. “…end user computing, the digital transformation, our customers need our help to get to the next level. Their employees need our help for (their) experience or their customer experience. …If you, as employers of people using technology that entices people to come work for you, that benefits you in a great way.”   Skip Gumble

See Episode 10 here:

You can watch all episodes of “The Attic” on the IGEL YouTube Channel or connect to The Attic on PodBean for direct links to all of the ways to listen in on your preferred podcast platform.

Thanks for stopping by The Attic. Stay tuned for more! Some of our upcoming guests include Mike Strohl, CEO of Entisys360.