Anjuna’s Category Creation Journey: Parallels with VMware and What B2B Founders Can Learn
History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Anjuna CEO Ayal Yogev revealed how studying VMware’s virtualization revolution has shaped their approach to creating the confidential computing category.
The VMware Blueprint
“VMware is a great example… I’m seeing a lot of similarities, kind of what we’re going through and what VMware went through in their early days,” Ayal explains. Like VMware with virtualization, Anjuna is making a fundamental infrastructure shift accessible to enterprises.
The Architecture Shift
Ayal draws direct parallels between the two transitions: “Every time there’s a shift in computing architecture, you need a software stack on top of it to essentially enable it, to make it easy to use this new computing architecture and to make it look the same across the different hardware solutions.”
This was VMware’s core insight with virtualization. “Before VMware, we had 10% utilization of servers in the data center. And cpu vendors added the ability to virtualize, to create these virtual machines, to create better utilization. But nobody was really using it because it meant rewriting everything from scratch, and nobody was going to do that.”
Making Complex Technology Accessible
Just as VMware made virtualization accessible, Anjuna aims to do the same for confidential computing. “What we’ve done is build a software stack to make it super simple to run anything in confidential computing,” Ayal shares. This approach solves the same fundamental adoption challenge VMware faced.
The Customer Choice Framework
When enterprises consider adopting confidential computing, Ayal presents them with the same choice VMware’s customers faced: “When people want to start using this, they essentially have a choice, either they go rebuild every application or they go use our platform.”
Rapid Enterprise Adoption
This familiar framework is driving rapid adoption. “We’re growing extremely fast. We’re about to quadrupling every year now,” Ayal reveals. Even more remarkably, they’re “closing deals with very large banks within a six month cycle, which is extremely fast compared to how these banks tend to move.”
Beyond Better Security
Like VMware, Anjuna isn’t just selling better technology – they’re enabling new possibilities. “Security is an enabler. If you build security the right way, then you can do things that you just couldn’t do before,” Ayal explains. This mirrors how VMware enabled entirely new approaches to infrastructure management.
Lessons for Category Creators
For founders creating new enterprise categories, Anjuna’s experience offers crucial insights:
- Use familiar reference points to explain revolutionary technology
- Frame adoption decisions in terms of clear choices
- Focus on enabling new capabilities, not just improving existing ones
- Make complex technological shifts accessible through software abstraction
The key lesson? Sometimes the best way to create a new category isn’t to emphasize its novelty, but to draw parallels with previous successful transitions. As Ayal’s experience shows, helping enterprises understand new technology through familiar patterns can accelerate adoption and category creation.
By following VMware’s playbook of making complex infrastructure shifts accessible through software, Anjuna isn’t just creating a new category – they’re following a proven path to becoming an infrastructure standard.