Dell EMC's Chad Sakac Takes New Role At Pivotal Software To Align Dell's Cloud, Software, Hardware

Chad Sakac, one of Dell EMC's and the storage industry's best-known technologists, has moved on to a new position in the Dell Technologies family of companies to focus on driving improved integration of the Pivotal Container Service and Pivotal Cloud Foundation with the rest of Dell.

Sakac, whose original position as president of Dell EMC's Converged Platforms and Solutions Division ended in January when the company split that business between its server and storage teams, on Wednesday wrote in a blog post that the next chapter of his life will be tied to Pivotal.

"The job is simple – helping make our aligned Dell Technologies developer platform come together, and make our answer on the 'how' (material = more important) of 'digital transformation' (buzzword = less important) reach more customers," Sakac wrote.

[Related: Chad Sakac On Dell EMC's Push To Turn Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Into A Utility]

Neither Sakac nor Pivotal Software responded to requests for comment.

Sakac started at EMC in late 2004 when his previous company, Allocity, was acquired by EMC. He was one of the leaders arranging the joint engineering and alliance with VMware after it was acquired by EMC. He was president of EMC's global systems engineering for four years before EMC was acquired by Dell, after which he became president of converged platforms and solutions for the combined company.

In his blog post, Sakac wrote that while he eventually hopes to be the CEO of his own company, for now he prefers working with a smaller team. And that opportunity came after some downtime during which he started to learn the Go language and working with Kubernetes.

Pivotal Container Service is also known by the acronym PKS, where the "K" stands for Kubernetes. PKS was introduced in August by VMware and Pivotal Software in a partnership with Google Cloud.

"I would love to be a CEO one day purely from the 'impact' and 'accountability' part of the gig – but frankly titles really are irrelevant except their correlation (not causation!) with what I call 'impact radius,'" he wrote. "I’ve had big teams, small teams - and it doesn’t correlate with what matters to me. What matters to me beyond my family (which always comes first) is: impact, people, learning and joy."

Sakac said that Dell Technologies has an emerging aligned technology stack that needs to accelerating. He broke that stack into three parts.

The first is the developer abstraction layer that uses Pivotal Cloud Foundry including application platforms in Pivotal Application Service, the PKS containers, functions from Pivotal Function Service, and data abstractions.

That layer runs on the software infrastructure abstraction layer which can be on any cloud but which is tightly integrated with VMware for software-defined technologies and cloud-native workloads.

The software layer runs on an hardware layer, Sakac said. Most of all, he said, it is tightly integrated and available in turnkey engineered systems from Dell EMC in the form of VxRail and VxRack SDDC."

Sakac said he will start his new role in April after some time off, after which he will serve as a bridge between different parts of Dell Technologies.

"I will make sure that Pivotal, VMware, and Dell EMC work hand in hand from how we work in the market, and how we bend the roadmaps to be aligned – and deliver on the dream for hundreds and then thousands, and then tens of thousands of customers and partners," he wrote.

Continuing as part of Dell Technologies was not a certainty, Sakac wrote. "I explored internal and external options – and was very lucky to have incredible support inside and outside the Dell Technology family," he wrote.