Melissa King began writing in 2001. She spent three years writing for her local newspaper, "The Colt," writing editorials, news stories, product reviews and entertainment pieces. She is also the owner and operator of Howbert Freelance Writing. King holds an Associate of Arts in communications from Tarrant County College.

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VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger is planning to leave the company once Dell closes its acquisition of EMC, multiple sources with knowledge of the executive's plans told CRN on Tuesday.

Tony Bates, the former Microsoft executive who joined VMware's board in February, and is currently president of videocamera vendor GoPro, is one candidate being considered to replace Gelsinger, said one source familiar with the CEO search.

Several senior software executives from Dell and EMC are also in the mix for the VMware CEO job, the source added.

[Related: Michael Dell On Dell-EMC's Storage Overlap, Future Acquisitions And The Blockbuster Deal's Channel Impact]

Spokesmen from VMware and EMC denied that Gelsinger is planning to leave the company. "That is categorically untrue," said the EMC spokesman. A Dell spokesman declined to comment.

One high-level EMC source said Gelsinger was directly responsible for the lackluster market performance of the vCloud Air hybrid cloud service, which has struggled to attract customers since launching three years ago. Bill Fathers, the executive in charge of running vCloud Air, left VMware last month.

"There have been a number of missteps at VMware, including vCloud Air," said the EMC source, who didn't want to be named.

The EMC source also suggested that Gelsinger hasn't played a cooperative role in EMC's Federation of subsidiary companies, which includes VMware, RSA, Pivotal, VCE and Virtustream.

"Our success is predicated on people working together -- not apart from one another. Whether it is Virtustream or Pivotal, they need to work together. Pat is not an easy guy to work with. Pat likes to do what Pat likes," said the EMC source.

The feeling inside Dell Technologies and EMC is that Gelsinger is not collaborating with the rest of the technology team, said the EMC source. "The goal of Dell Technologies is to work closer as a team," said the source. "I don't know if Pat is completely on board with that model."

Some of CRN's sources said VMware plans to announce Gelsinger's departure at its annual VMworld conference, which is being held from Aug. 28 to Sept. 1 in Las Vegas.

Shortly after Dell announced its $67 billion bid to acquire EMC last October -- the largest deal in technology industry history -- EMC and VMware agreed to combine vCloud Air and EMC's Virtustream into a cloud joint venture.

But VMware shares plummeted in the wake of the announcement, as shareholders weren't happy that VMware would be taking on $200 million to $300 million in costs associated with the formation of the new cloud company. VMware pulled out of the joint venture in December.

Sources told CRN at the time that the vCloud Air-Virtustream joint venture idea came not from Gelsinger, but from EMC's top leadership.

"VMware didn't want anything to do with the joint venture, and the Virtustream people didn't want anything to do with it, either," one source close to VMware and EMC told CRN in January. "The old guard at EMC was trying to force the entire thing."

Re/code reported in February that EMC CEO Joe Tucci was "said to have been annoyed" by VMware's decision to pull out of the joint venture.

Speculation about Gelsinger's future at Dell Technologies spiked last week after he didn't make his customary appearance at parent company's EMC World event. Gelsinger's traditional keynote slot was filled by Dell CEO Michael Dell.

Gelsinger joined VMware in August 2012 from EMC, where he was president and COO of the storage giant's Information Infrastructure Products division. Gelsinger started his career at Intel and spent 30 years at the chipmaker, serving as its first CTO and leading development of the original 486 processor.

Gelsinger immediately won favor with VMware partners and customers by ending vRAM, the controversial vSphere server virtualization licensing scheme that Maritz had introduced. Gelsinger also unwound Maritz's strategy of building a portolio of apps free from any ties to Windows, selling Zimbra and Socialcast in 2013.

Under Gelsinger's leadership, VMware's annual revenue has grown from $4.6 billion to around $6.5 billion. Although sales of the vSphere server virtualization cash cow are declining, Gelsinger has steered VMware's focus toward NSX software-defined networking and VSAN software-defined storage businesses, which are both seeing promising revenue and customer growth.

Gelsinger also pulled the trigger on VMware's largest acquisition ever -- its $1.54 billion purchase of AirWatch in 2014 -- giving the virtualization vendor much-needed credibility in a mobile device management market in which it had long sought traction. AirWatch had total bookings of $370 million in VMware's fiscal 2015.

Meanwhile, Gelsinger has seen several of his top executives depart over the past nine months, including CTO Ben Fathi, COO Carl Eschenbach, CFO Jonathan Chadwick, and Martin Casado, the former CTO of Nicira and head of VMware's security and networking business.

During VMware's first quarter earnings call last month, a Wall Street analyst asked Gelsinger if these departures would impact VMware's business. He responded by noting that VMware is still having no problem attracting top talent.

"I want to just say overall, we've managed through these transitions highly effectively, and I'm quite proud of my leadership team in getting that done," Gelsinger said.

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Earning specialized certifications is a surefire way to advance your career in the IT field, regardless of industry or current career level. The right certification validates your skills and knowledge, which makes you more desirable to future employers who want to attract and retain the best employees. Below, we’ll explore the top IT certifications and share how to examine your goals to choose the right path forward. 

"We purchased the array through Dell for their support of EMC products," said Mark Craft, systems administrator at Dewberry and Davis. "So far, they haven't had any complaints."

But such a deal represents a big source of complaints among EMC solution providers. Many say the Hopkinton, Mass., storage vendor's Clariion reseller pact with Dell,now a year old,is squeezing their business because the direct computer seller wields a pricing advantage. Some EMC channel partners, in fact, say that Dell hardware in the data center almost ensures a lost sales opportunity for them, and others are concerned that Dell, Round Rock, Texas, could gobble up other segments of the EMC channel.

Their dismay comes with good reason, since Dell has become EMC's biggest storage reseller. EMC CEO Joe Tucci said at a exact conference that one-third of the vendor's Clariion revenue comes via Dell, with solution provider and direct sales also each accounting for one-third of the product line's revenue. The Dell business, however, is the fastest growing segment of the three, Tucci said.

The Dell-EMC alliance particularly has become a thorn in the side of storage solution providers in the enterprise Windows space. For example, Pat Edwards, vice president of sales at Alliance Technology Group, a Hanover, Md.-based solution provider, bristles when people call Dell a reseller of EMC products.

"We're not in the same category with Dell," Edwards said. "EMC gets away with [selling around solution providers by saying that they don't sell direct. They sell to a direct manufacturer like Dell and wash their hands of it."

For storage-only solution providers, selling to a customer that has Dell servers in place is tough, Edwards noted. "If I want to compete there, I have to sell Hewlett-Packard, IBM or Sun servers. But I don't lead with servers," he said. "I will provide servers as a bundle with storage if customers need it. But it's not their business."

If a solution provider enters a customer site and sees Dell products on the floor, it's assumed that the customer shops only for the best price, Edwards added. "Our salesperson will ask if the customer is talking to other vendors. If they say no, they know they're lying," he said.

The Dell relationship is one of the few black marks on EMC's otherwise channel-friendly record, the storage vendor's partners say. Yet Gregg Ambulos, vice president of global channels at EMC, said there's no reason for solution providers to compete with Dell head-to-head on Clariion arrays.

Most of EMC's Dell business should come from the low-cost Windows NT market with EMC's new CX200 entry-level array, while solution providers can serve customers with the midrange CX400 and enterprise-class CX600 arrays, Ambulos said. What's more, solution providers' ability to offer customers complete solutions separates them from low-cost providers like Dell, he said.

"If a solution provider wants to compete head-on with Dell on hardware price, nine times out of 10 Dell will win," Ambulos said. "But if they target solutions, nine of 10 times the VAR will win."

While Dell receives better pricing from EMC than solution providers do, the arrangement is no different than the volume pricing EMC offers its largest partners, Ambulos said, adding that he can't recall a single solution provider that has left EMC because of its Dell relationship.

"If this was having a dramatic impact on the market, they would have a lot of partners question the relationship," he said. "Dell is a key partner of ours, but so are other channel partners."

J. Edward McCann, regional manager at Continental Resources, a Bedford, Mass.-based solution provider, said his company isn't very panic about competition from Dell right now. "Dell has done a real good job with its pricing. Once a customer has Dell servers, storage sales are tough. But if they are talking about a large solution, they can beat Dell," he said.

However, as Dell grows the market share for its EMC arrays in the Windows space, there's nothing to prevent it from entering the Unix space, said McCann, whose company is a Sun Microsystems partner.

"If Dell comes in from the NT side to my Unix side and offers service contracts that cost a third of mine, it will hurt the channel. If there is a large enough price delta, common sense says it will hurt us," he said.

And that scenario stands as a real possibility, if things go according to Dell's plans. When EMC introduced its CX600 array in August, Dell said it would use the array to enter the heterogeneous Unix/NT enterprise space and target Unix-only shops for the first time with its commodity-based pricing model.

But since then, Dell has relied on services and its ability to target key markets to ensure that it doesn't compete on price alone, said Terry Klein, vice president of the Advanced Systems Group for Dell Americas. Dell, which sells the Clariion arrays under the Dell-EMC name, is rarely the low-cost leader, Klein said. About 80 percent of the installation and product-readiness services related to Dell servers and Dell-EMC arrays are done by Dell staff, with help from EMC personnel when needed, he said.

"Because they mandate these services, they find that [with the real end-user sales price for the entire bundled configuration, they are rarely the low-cost Clariion provider to an end user," Klein said.

"We may have really aggressive hardware rates, but they find that very few other [EMC channel partners are mandating three years [of warranty or their own installation and/or minimal set of product readiness," he said. "Most of them have one year of service-type of warranty agreements. It's something that they battle with their sales organization about because that's not a typical Dell proposition. We're used to being low-cost, and they end up having to sell more on the value of understanding how this space works."

Because of such services, Dell ends up with a higher price than its competitors,including solution providers,in about eight out of 10 cases, according to Klein. However, about 95 percent of storage sales have gone into Dell server environments, he added.

"There are very few cases where we're going to sell the EMC product where they don't already have the servers," Klein said. "[These customers value their knowledge of Windows. They value their knowledge of the Linux environment. And they value us doing complete sets of server-storage consolidation. If they don't have that element with the customer, it doesn't matter if we're the low-cost provider or the high-cost provider. They won't buy it from us."

The frequency with which Dell competes against solution providers depends on the customer type, according to Klein. For instance, in the Fortune 2000 space, it's rare for Dell to go up against EMC channel partners, but in the government space,where Dell's server market share tops 50 percent,competition depends on which integrator owns a particular government contract, he said.

Similarly, while Dell pretty much owns the state and local government market and the education space either directly or via its relationship with EDS, it has trouble against EMC partners in the health-care arena, Klein said.

Indeed, if EMC solution providers leverage the Dell-EMC relationship, it can mean more business for them, said Bill Taylor, director of EMC's global channel development group.

"I can ensure you that a lot of their partners are doing well with the Clariion business because of all the Dell hype," Taylor said. "It's a brand-name recognition game."

Some solution providers say they're finding that Dell's sales of Clariion arrays can even benefit their business. "We can get some services from Dell because of customer needs," said Chris Swahn, national president of sales at Amherst Corporate Computer Sales and Solutions, Merrimack, N.H. "Our technology, integration and delivery capabilities offer value to their customers. They do a lot of imaging, ghosting and loads on Dell servers."

For Amherst, the Dell-EMC alliance is a minimal factor in the midrange and enterprise spaces, but that could change, said Swahn. "Even in the midrange shops that have Dell relationships, we're not seeing a lot of action with Dell storage. Of course, maybe the other shoe will fall, and [Dell will come in later," he said.

A former EMC partner, Amherst is mulling the possibility of reuniting with the vendor now that its channel-unfriendly past is fading away, according to Swahn.

"EMC wants to get into the SMB market. [Now they're looking at how to do it," he said. "They already have the best technology. So we're evaluating them again, based not on technology but on their channel capabilities."

Alliance Technology Group also had previously dropped EMC's Clariion line, but the solution provider recently decided to restart its Clariion relationship with the vendor, Edwards said.

And those solution providers likely will see more competition. Looking ahead, Dell and EMC executives expect their relationship to expand.

In late October, the vendors announced that EMC had licensed Dell to manufacture the entry-level CX200, slated to ship early this month. EMC's Tucci also said he isn't ruling out the possibility that Dell could eventually make Clariion storage arrays for the rest of EMC's channel,a move that some industry observers say would put EMC partners in the difficult position of purchasing EMC products from its strongest competitor.

"We are not closing any doors," Tucci said. "We continually [review it, like any relationship. In any relationship, you plant the seeds, grow and learn from each other. Right now, far and away, the volume seller by Dell will be the CX200. And they are manufacturing it to control their own destiny."

The fact that future EMC arrays could be manufactured in conjunction with Dell doesn't concern Kevin Reith, manager of strategic technology at Info Systems, a Wilmington, Del.-based solution provider.

"Who makes it is not important," Reith said. "I believe in the virtual organization: Do what you do best, and let others do the rest. So it doesn't bother me. What's more important is how they support and market the products."

STEVEN BURKE contributed to this story.

With support from Dell EMC, and in association with Intel and Microsoft, Dippy's Naturenauts offers a mobile-friendly interactive experience for children aged seven to eleven.

A fun activity that supports Dippy on Tour, Dippy and Fern the fox lead kids through a series of exploratory games that encourage them to venture outdoors and interact with the nature in their area while learning about science.

Through their generous support of Dippy on Tour and Dippy's Naturenauts, Dell EMC helped the Museum to help the next generation of scientists engage with the natural world through a leading a digital experience, guiding and engage them in scientific thinking.