Steve Herrod is the Chief Technology Officer and SVP of R&D at VMware. As CTO, Steve helps drive the company’s technology strategy and works with the engineering teams towards continued delivery of innovative products. The greatest innovations push technology limits, but are also simple to use and elegantly accessible. Steve helps drive these advances directly and via members of the Office of the CTO. Steve provides particular leadership around technology collaborations between VMware engineering and our partners and customers. He plays an integral role in VMware’s acquisition strategy as well as in VMware’s strategic partnerships. Recent focus areas have centered on the acquisition of SpringSource as well as our partnerships with Salesforce.com and Google. Steve was one of the first VMware engineering directors and remains a strong champion of engineering innovation at the company. He was named CTO of the Year by InfoWorld in 2009 and sits on the EMC Technical Advisory Board. Prior to joining VMware Steve co-led the development of a virtual CPU with "Code Morphing" technology at Transmeta Corporation, as part of his now 20-year professional tenure in the field of virtualization. Steve’s personal interests include the advancement of children’s education, particularly around science and technology. He serves on the board of the progressive Peninsula School in Menlo Park, California, and is working to apply cloud computing towards the improvement of the U.S. educational system. Steve holds a Ph.D. and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin.