During his four years as CEO of VMware, Maritz helped dramatically increase the company's fortunes. When he took charge in 2008, about 25 percent of the world's Intel-based applications were running on a virtualized base. Four years later, that figure is 60 percent. In that same period, the number of VMware certified professionals has risen from 25,000 to 125,000.

"Back in 2008, we were asking ourselves what the hell is it," Maritz said of cloud computing. "Now we're asking ourselves: What do we do about it? How do we actually implement it? How do you transform your operations to take full advantage of it? What's going to happen in four years' time? Where are we going with this technology?"

"Where we are going is influenced by an enormous set of forces that are affecting our industry," he added. "We're coming to the mature stages of a very successful 50-year journey to automate most of the paper-based processes in the world. Businesses are absolutely dependent on these capabilities and they're not going to go away. At this point they're just table stakes. What's happening now is the imperative to deliver fundamentally new experiences to both end users and end customers."

But these new experiences can't be delivered on today's IT infrastructure, he said. To meet the future, he said, IT needs to be even more efficient and more agile.

"We are going to see an equal transition in IT over the next four years that we've seen over the past four years," he said. Maritz believes that to deliver the agility and efficiency required to meet the future, transformation is required at every level of IT from infrastructure to applications to access.