If you've been wondering what former VMware CEO Paul Maritz has been
doing for the last eight months or so, last week the proverbial cat was
let out of the bag. Maritz has been acting as chief executive of a new
entity called Pivotal, a San Francisco-based cloud services company
being spun off from a combined collection of EMC and VMware technologies and developers.
After being replaced by Pat Gelsinger as CEO of EMC-owned VMware
last July, Maritz was given the title "chief strategist" at EMC, a role
many believed to be a temporary placeholder on his way to becoming heir
apparent at EMC, if and when Joe Tucci steps down as CEO. When
Gelsinger took over the reins at VMware, Tucci explained it was time to
move on to the next phase of cloud computing and solving the problems of
the post-PC era where there was a tremendous opportunity around data
and new products.
Maritz said that moving on from VMware would give him the freedom to
think about some of these new application-oriented opportunities and
address two of those very big opportunities: cloud infrastructure and what you can do on top of that cloud infrastructure.
Evidently,
eight months was just the right amount of time needed for Maritz to get
things kicked off. Last week, ahead of the formal announcement planned
for April 29, the two companies unveiled their new Pivotal spinoff as a
well-financed and technology-rich competitor to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other cloud service providers such as Rackspace, GoGrid, Microsoft, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM.
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Read the entire InfoWorld Virtualization Report article.