I'm not really sure what the point the author was trying to make. vCenter is not a cutting edge piece of software when you compare it to modern cloud offerings like AWS or even OpenStack. vCenter is, however, very good at what it does, and in many ways does a lot of things that new cloudy offerings will probably never do.

One thing I can say about Thuan, having worked for him at VMware for a long time, he always tried pushing things. My guess is Uber saw that and figured he'd make a good fit.