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EMC Chief Strategist Paul Maritz will lead a new platform group that will combine VMware’s Cloud Foundry, SpringSource, and Gemstone with EMC’s big data platform - Greenplum.

According to sources close to the company, EMC will announce the news next week. It’s unclear whether other groups will be affected by the move. As part of the new group, about 1,000 people will move from VMware to work under Maritz who left VMware as CEO this past summer.

GigaOm first posted on the news earlier this week. Hat tip to Barb Darrow for getting to the news.

EMC declined to comment for this story. VMware executives did not respond to requests for comment.

When Maritz left VMware, I wrote that he would be leading a potential spin out of a group that would include Cloud Foundry. Some scoffed at this, but now things are starting to makes sense. This is a smart move.

Cloud Foundry is the much-heralded platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that VMware launched in 2011 as an open project. It gained a fast following and has since served as the basis for its use as a service to build out platforms on public or enterprise data infrastructures. Partners include AppFog and Tier3. SpringSource is the Java framework that VMware acquired in 2009. It has gone largely underutilized under VMware. Gemstone is the distributed in-memory data cache solution that has been doing well but mostly because the group had its own customer base before moving inside to VMware. On the EMC side of the fence, Greenplum is the big data analytics platform that EMC acquired in 2010. It has since shown strong growth, as big data is the focus at EMC.

A source said to me at AWS re:Invent this week that VMware is more of a management systems company these days. Its core service is increasingly as a company that manages data centers with an emphasis on using its number one spot in the virtualization market. Cloud Foundry fits far better with SpringSource and Gemstone at EMC than at VMware.

Under Maritz, there will be the freedom to create a compelling package that bridges a platform play with a Java framework and a data-driven underpinning with Greenplum. It’s also great for Maritz, who is an innovator at heart. He can lead this new group with the freedom to look beyond and perhaps even partner with Amazon Web Services.



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