VMware is on the verge of a major shakeup that will see the company replace CEO Paul Maritz and spin-off Cloud Foundry, its highly-regarded open source cloud-building platform, according to reports citing unnamed sources.
On Monday, trade publication CRN reported that VMware CEO Paul Maritz will be replaced by Pat Gelsinger, the former Intel bigwig who is now president and chief operating officer of storage giant EMC, VMare's parent company.
The news came just hours after Gigaom reported that VMware is spinning off Cloud Foundry into a new company that wil also oversee Project Rubicon -- a joint venture between VMware and EMC that seeks to build another type of cloud builder -- and the EMC data analytics outfit Greenplum.
VMware was not immediately available to comment on the reports.
CRN cited multiple sources familiar with the situation in reporting that Maritz will give way to Geslinger, but said it's still unclear whether Maritz will remain with EMC. Maritz -- a former Microsoft vice president -- joined EMC in 2008 with its acquisition of a software startup called Pi Corp, and Gelsinger joined the next year, after three decades at Intel.
CRN said it's possible that Maritz could take over the CEO role at EMC, citing a longtime partner of both EMC and Vmware.
It's also unclear how the rumored CEO change is related to Gigaom's report that EMC and VMware are spinning off a new cloud company. Citing sources close to the deal, Gigaom reported that the spinoff -- which is not yet finalized -- would help VMware compete with cloud services offered by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.
VMware is known for virtual machines -- machines that exist only as software. The Silicon Valley outfit made its name in the computer data center, helping big businesses save both money and space by slotting many virtual servers onto a single physical server. But in recent years under Maritz, it was worked to expand its mission, acquiring several developer-minded software companies and creating new cloud platforms Cloud Foundry and Project Rubicom in an effort to compete with the Amazons and the Googles of the world.
Cloud Foundry is a way for software developers and businesses to build web applications, deploy them to the net, and scale them to more and more users as needed -- all without having to worry about the computing infrastructure that runs beneath them. "It lets you worry about the app," Derek Collison, one of the engineers that built the platform, told us this fall, "and not virtual machines or what operating system they’re running or all this other stuff."
This sort of thing is typically called a "platform cloud." It's similar to Google's App Engine service, and parts of Microsoft Azure. But VMware has also worked to provide software for building "infrastructure cloud," services that provide access to raw computing resources, including virtual servers. Using these services may require more work than using a platform cloud, but they can also provide a bit more freedom.
Virtualization software -- such as the vSphere software offered by VMware -- underpins these services, but Bernd Harzog, an analyst with the research outfit The Virtualization Practice, believes that it makes sense to for VMware to spin-off its cloud work. VMware currently offers vCloud -- an infrastructure cloud offering based on vSphere -- but Harzog argues that this is just a stopgap measure, that you need a separate operation focusing on building cloud services from the ground up.
"This amounts to the fact you can't just take vSphere and make a cloud computing platform out of it," he tells Wired. "You have to start over."
Though some estimates put the vSphere's market share as high as 80 percent, it is not used by the big cloud players. Amazon, for instance, uses the open source Xen hypervisor, while Google's new infrastructure cloud, Google Compute Engine, uses the open source KVM software. Clearly, VMware wanted to stake a claim to the burgeoning cloud market -- and apparently, it's willing to make some major changes to get there.
