Paul Maritz Steps Down as CEO of VMware; EMC's Gelsinger in

Paul Maritz is stepping down as CEO of VMware and will be replaced by EMC President and COO Pat Gelsinger.

As part of the widely reported executive shakeup that EMC and VMware confirmed Tuesday afternoon, Maritz will become a chief technology strategist at EMC, where he will also assume an active role on the board of directors. The transition will be effective starting Sept. 1.

Geslinger, VMware's new chief, is a former three-decade veteran of Intel, where he worked on strategy for the x86 architecture before becoming president and COO at EMC. Before becoming CEO of VMware, Maritz worked at Intel for a brief stint and Microsoft for 14 years. He founded cloud company Pi Corp., which was bought by EMC in 2008, at which time he became CEO of the virtualization company.

Rumors first circulated Monday afternoon that VMware would be spinning out its popular open source PaaS offering, Cloud Foundry, EMC's big data service named Greenplum and the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering named Project Rubicon as a separate company, but the executives made no mention of a new spin ut during a conference call announcing the executive changes.

VMware's been busy recently, announcing the acquisition of DynamicOps earlier this month in what some called a shift in strategy to support non-VMware hypervisors in cloud computing. Last month, VMware announced Project Serengeti, an open-source Hadoop compatibility tool to be used on VMware products and earlier this year, at Interop, VMware executives spoke about the need to virtualize the rest of the data center beyond servers.