Chris serves as CTO, Global Field and Industry at VMware. In that role, Chris is responsible for driving the execution and communication of the Office of the CTO's vision, internally and externally, supporting VMware's global field teams on all CTO evangelism and representing VMware's technical vision to customers, partners and analysts. He also owns and manages the field CTO activities and helps drive the CTO Ambassador (CTOA) programs and industry-vertical CTO activities.

Prior to joining VMware, Chris was a Research Vice President for Gartner's Technical Professionals service, where he managed the data center and private cloud research agenda, and was responsible for the strategic direction and technical accuracy of the team's collective research. There he had the privilege of engaging with more than 200 end-user organizations annually, advising CIOs, architects and directors on private and hybrid cloud computing, server virtualization, and desktop transformation strategies.

Before that, Chris was a founding member of the Data Center Strategies team at Burton Group, was a nationally recognized independent virtualization consultant and instructor at multiple colleges, worked for several years at CommVault Systems, and started his IT and technology career in the US Marines. He also authored "Virtualization: From the Desktop to the Enterprise," the first book that was exclusively devoted to defining all aspects of x86 virtualization as we know it today.