Reports of major changes at VMware Inc, including the departure of Chief Executive Paul Maritz, sent the software maker’s shares down on Tuesday, highlighting increasingly negative sentiment on the once high-flying stock.

VMware VMW shed more than 3% to $81.66 in heavy trading, on media reports that Maritz was leaving and that the company was considering spinning off its cloud business. The stock has fallen more than 25% in the last three months.

According to the Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, Maritz is going to be become a vice chairman at EMC Corp. EMC which has a roughly 80% stake in VMware. Meanwhile, EMC executive Pat Gelsinger will take over as VMware’s CEO. The changes were first reported by the tech trade publication, CRN.

A VMware spokesman said the company does not comment on speculation or rumors.

VMware is a considered a pioneer in the field of virtualization which enables businesses to tap disparate computer systems on their premises or on hosted data centers as one network and use that computing capacity based on need.

The company is viewed as a key player in the cloud computing trend, in which companies access computing power through a network instead of setting up and maintaining expensive data centers.

These trends once turned VMware into a Wall Street favorite, but the company also felt the impact of worries about the macro economy.

In April, the company announced that its well-regarded Chief Financial Officer Mark Peek was leaving to become the CFO of Workday, another software company.

On VMware’s change, Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund wrote: “We have great admiration for Mr. Maritz and view his departure, if true, as a loss to VMware’s minority shareholders.”

Meanwhile, ThinkEquity analyst Rajesh Ghai said he was surprised by reports on executive changes which he said “may be pure speculation.”

“I am surprised that the news items suggest that Pat Gelsinger is not a front runner for the EMC CEO role considering his influence on the product roadmap over the past few years and given he has been clearly the person that EMC has been grooming to be Joe Tucci’s successor in terms of how he has been exposed to investors and EMC customers,” he said in e-mailed comments.

Gelsinger, a former top executive at Intel Corp., joined EMC in 2009 as chief operating officer and is widely-considered EMC CEO Tucci’s likely successor.

Ghai also noted that VMware also has seen its stock slip recently “because of fears related to the impact of the declining global macro.”

“Weak results from players such as Informatica have not helped either,” he said, though he noted that the company is “probably faring incrementally better in this environment than other software companies.”

“I think spending on the company’s virtualization technology continues strong given most of the spending is really part of long-term IT projects which CIOs think are strategic and hence are unlikely to be curtailed in a weak macro,” he added.