The Workstation and Fusion teams are having a very busy year. Since we shipped Workstation 12 and Fusion 8 almost a year ago, we’ve been busy adding new skills to the development teams so that we can take the products in a new and compelling direction. Added to that, the team has released several updates that you really should be loading on to your systems – they make the products better in a bunch of ways that are described here, here and here.

Given that some of the new features we’re working on are aimed at developers, we recently sponsored a Macworld party at WWDC so that people could meet the me and the rest of the management team. I was impressed by how passionate and supportive the party-goers were, and we certainly learned a lot. Our backlog of ideas almost doubled!

More sober and back in the office, it occurred to us that more people might like to meet the team too. The management team is boring, that’s just the five of us Powerpoint jockies; the real teams that do the hard work of building, delivering and supporting the products are a diverse group of people spread all over the world.

The core compute, storage and network guys work on all of VMware’s hypervisors and are known as Layer 1. These guys build the hypervisor as well as our Virtual Devices (all the “hardware” that Windows/guests see), the Graphics stack, the Networking stack, VMware Tools, VMRC (the ‘console’ view), USB devices, and the list goes on… In the photo is about half of the group. Every one of the people in this photo is a certifiable genius, and without these guys, a whole industry would not exist.

Once they’ve done their voodoo, as they do, they pass the base code to these guys, our Hosted-UI (Product) and QE (Quality) teams. These folks have the incredibly difficult task of turning what is basically just cool tech, in to the products you love. And they do it exceedingly well. Every time we do a customer survey, Workstation and Fusion score the highest of all our products for quality and satisfaction. Our Hosted-UI team members, past and present, put in a lot of hours making Fusion and Workstation the amazing products they are today, and for that we can’t begin to express our gratitude. By the same extension, we couldn’t be more excited about what we have in store for the future!

Of course, even with awesome quality control, sometimes you just need help solving a problem, and that’s where these guys come in. This is about half of our 24 hour, 7 days a week, Workstation and Fusion support staff. These guys are the ones we listen to the most. Building new products is fun, but we’re very aware that you rely on them to solve real world problems. These guys are our canaries, our triage, our compass. We couldn’t do it without them.

This combined team is working tirelessly to support you in your business. They’ve got a great surprise lined up for Q3, something very interesting for Q4, and something very big for H1. It’s not easy delivering a product that is downloaded almost 5 million times a year, but these people are the very best at what they do, and we’re proud to have them with us.