Paul Maritz Out As VMware CEO And Mentioned As Candidate For Top Spot At EMC Or Cloud Foundry Spin Off
Paul Maritz is out as the CEO of VMware and will be replaced by EMC COO Pat Gelsinger. — Maritz spent four years at VMware. It's uncertain what he will do but rumors have swirled all day about about his departure.
Context & Ripple Effects
Paul Maritz's exit ends a four-year run at VMware during which the company grew into what IDC analysts were already calling a genuine threat to Microsoft back in 2009, and closed 2011 with quarterly revenue of $835.6 million, up 37 percent. His replacement, Pat Gelsinger, arrives not from outside but from inside the family — he was EMC's COO, underscoring how tightly the parent still holds its virtualization crown jewel.
The story drew unusually broad pickup on the day — GigaOM, ZDNet, VentureBeat, Fortune, GeekWire and others — with GigaOM framing the move around VMware's plan to spin out its cloud business to keep pace with Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Where Maritz lands next is unconfirmed: reports name him only as a rumored candidate for a top spot at EMC itself or at the Cloud Foundry spin-off, the open-source PaaS effort VMware has been building since releasing Micro Cloud Foundry as a developer-run image in 2011.
First-order effects
- Pat Gelsinger takes over VMware immediately, swapping his EMC COO seat for the subsidiary's top job and putting an EMC insider in charge of the unit that drives most of the group's software value.
- Maritz leaves with no announced role; the only destinations in circulation — a senior post at EMC or leadership of a spun-out Cloud Foundry — remain rumors, not confirmed appointments.
Second-order effects
- If Cloud Foundry does spin out, VMware's open-source PaaS becomes a standalone competitor positioned directly against Microsoft, Amazon and Google's platform clouds rather than a feature of the hypervisor business.
- EMC deepens operational control over VMware through personnel rather than structure, which will shape how any future separation of the two companies gets negotiated.
Third-order effects
- The move fits a pattern of EMC-group executives rotating between parent and subsidiaries, keeping strategy coordinated across virtualization, storage and emerging cloud platforms.
- Betting the next act on Cloud Foundry signals that the industry sees open-source PaaS, not the hypervisor alone, as the layer where differentiation against Microsoft, Amazon and Google will be contested.
The trend: Enterprise virtualization leaders are reorganizing around cloud platforms, with EMC using executive rotation across VMware and potential spin-outs like Cloud Foundry to position against Microsoft, Amazon and Google.