During her 13 years at VMware, CCO Joan Stone has handled communications around roughly 50 acquisitions, most of which involved the cloud computing company picking up a smaller service provider. Now, VMware is on the other side of the table as Broadcom’s plan to buy the company for $61 billion works its way toward being approved. In an interview with PRovoke Media, Stone discussed the challenges of managing comms around a deal of this size, quelling concerns among stakeholders and feeling the heat of being in the tech sector. An edited transcript:

You have handled comms around roughly 50 acquisition deals during your 13 years at VMware. What kind of new comms challenges is the Broadcom deal unearthing that are different than what you’ve dealt with in the past?

From a comms perspective, I don’t have as much experience being acquired (as acquiring others). Obviously, we have had relationships and we were owned in part by both Dell and EMC, and those transitions were both certainly learning opportunities. But they’re not comparable now with what’s happening with Broadcom and a $61 billion deal to move the company into a bigger company. It’s different being on this side. I think the learning moment is that any kind of change brings uncertainty with our stakeholder audience. What we are focused on doing is continuing that VMware conversation on why we’re relevant, what we’re doing for our customers and what the benefits of the transaction will be when it closes. Balancing the uncertainty that’s going on with regulatory milestones and things that are hitting the market and our customers with waiting (for the deal to close), we’re really focused on multi-cloud leadership and what we do for our customers every day. And we are a standalone company and we’re continuing to do that work. Our focus is still the VMware story but obviously we need to navigate more.

 

So even amid this massive deal, sticking to business as usual is part of your strategy.

Absolutely. We’re focused on deepening employee engagement, our culture, our community. We’re focused on helping our leaders be effective from a communications perspective, continuing to differentiate our company. At the same time, we’re doing business press interviews right now, (telling a) different story. Our executives are ready and able to work through the Broadcom conversation and then bring it back to VMware because that really is what our job is — to build awareness around VMware. Ninety percent is the work that we have been doing. Ten percent is navigation. Comms folks in general are navigating a lot right now beyond their remit — social issues, political issues, uncertainty for different marketplaces. So it kind of comes with the territory.

 

Yet a deal the size of VMware and Broadcom’s has to raise concerns among stakeholders.

We have learned that we can be upfront and be transparent, to say to our employee base, let’s talk about who we are as a standalone company, but we are always going to answer any questions you have about the pending transaction. Same for our customers, same for the industry analysts. Let’s help you understand what we understand and what we can share with you and what we can’t. I think leading with it is always more helpful because it just kind of settles things down. There are no surprises there are no secrets.

 

Are you impacted by the heightened scrutiny of the tech industry?

Within the tech sector there is a set of five companies that everyone watches and that’s a different technology peer set versus what we do every day. Yet we are impacted by the bigger conversation going on — whether tech is for good, whether tech is for bad; what’s going on with consumers; what’s going on with social media and whether social media is impacting younger generation negatively. All those things breathe into our conversation even though we are a very different company than those companies. It's pretty noisy and you have to know how to navigate it, where you sit and who your customers are. Because you can get really, really distracted as a tech comms person if you’re always paying attention to this broader narrative and not to what your particular customers and employees care about.

How has your job evolved during your time at VMware?

In the last 10 years one of the things I’m most proud of both in the VMware environment and also more broadly in the communications industry, is we now officially have a seat at the table. It’s no longer about why is comms in the room. It’s more about if comms isn’t in the room. From an industry perspective we have made huge strides and now it’s just a given that comms is there, and we are having strategic conversations. And that’s due to having so comms professionals being at the right time at the right place with the right counsel to show and demonstrate the impact we can have on a company’s reputation or a company’s awareness.