On Wednesday, VMware named long-time exec Raghu Raghuram to its vacant CEO slot, giving him the responsibility for shepherding the cloud software giant through its $9.6 billion spinout from parent company Dell. At the same time, Sanjay Poonen, the interim CEO who had been Raghuram's co-CEO, announced his departure from the company. Its former CEO of eight years, Pat Gelsinger, departed to lead Intel in February. Meanwhile, it continues to make greater investments in the cloud, and a hybrid strategy in particular (where customers move some of their workloads to the cloud, but retain others in private data centers). Experts say that there are challenges ahead for the company, but also major opportunities too.