VMware announced Tuesday morning that Sanjay Poonen is taking over as the head of its end-user computing group.

Poonen holds two patents, as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School and a master’s degree from Stanford University. He began his career as an engineer for Microsoft, and advanced to executive positions at prominent tech firms such as Symantec, VERITAS and Informatica. He most recently served the president of global solutions and go-to-market for BI giant SAP.

TheCube crew caught up with Poonen at SAP Sapphire 2011 to get his take on cloud computing and its impact on the ecosystem value change.

“System integration and integration consulting work is always gonna evolve into higher levels of strategy,” the executive told theCube hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante. “You’re probably not going to do as much of the integration of systems in the backend because people have that inside their data centers. You’re probably gonna have to use a set of cloud services to build differentiated applications and logic on top of that. A new breed of consulting firms are emerging that are doing this faster and better, and if you think about the early days of the dot com [revolution], that’s what happened there too.”

To see the full interview, check out the video below.

Earlier this week we reported that Chuck Hollis, EMC’s charismatic CTO of global marketing, joined VMware as the chief strategist of its new storage application services business group. The executive didn’t disclose too much about his new position, but he indicated that he will spearheading the virtualization provider’s push into the emerging software-defined storage (SDS) space.

Software-defined technologies represents both a threat and an opportunity for traditional enterprise vendors such as VMware. The company has stepped up its investment in this area since it shed its cloud assets onto Pivotal Labs earlier this year.