VMware CEO Paul Maritz: Cloud Checkmate

As technology industry CEOs go, VMware’s Paul Maritz is as unassuming as they come. But don’t be fooled by his low-key disposition and kindly college professor demeanour. Maritz is a stone-cold assassin – at least when it comes to dealing with IT industry competition. As it turns out, this skill is very well suited to the evolving chess game known as cloud computing, in which VMware and its rivals are essentially starting out at square one.

At Microsoft, Maritz was widely considered the No. 3 executive behind Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, and by the time he left the software giant in 2000 his canny ability to checkmate one competitor after another – think WordPerfect, Lotus and Netscape – had become the stuff of company legend. During Maritz’s tenure, Microsoft also came to realise office productivity software was best sold as an integrated suite, as opposed to point products, and this led to the creation of Office.

Maritz is making moves – and taking some risks – to help VMware leverage its lofty position as the virtualisation software market leader into a dominant one in cloud computing. And he’s stepping up his game when it comes to pushing VMware’s products as an integrated cloud infrastructure stack.

Maritz and company have just released the largest simultaneous product update in the company’s 13-year history, which includes VMware vSphere 5, the first major update to its cloud operating system. Other parts of VMware’s cloud infrastructure stack, including vShield, vCloud Director and Site Recovery Manager, part of the vcentre product family, have been imbued with features that automate IT processes that used to require human intervention. In other words, VMware has made them more cloudlike.

Maritz would probably cringe at the comparison, but there’s an argument to be made that VMware is becoming the Microsoft of the cloud – with a hand in everything from the cloud operating system to the applications – collecting tolls for all the services it provides along the way. At any rate, VMware’s aggressive charge into the cloud stands to dramatically impact the balance sheet of solution providers that have built huge services business around VMware virtualisation software.