As part of its July 17 earnings announcement, VMware quelled the rumors about their changes in executive leadership by confirming that ex-Intel exec and COO of EMC Information Infrastructure Products, Pat Gelsinger, will assume the role of CEO for VMware. As part of the same announcement, VMware stated that Paul Maritz, formerly with Microsoft and current VMware CEO, will take on a new technical strategist role with VMware's parent company, EMC. Maritz will also continue to be a part of VMware's board of directors. This confirms many of the recent rumors regarding VMware's executive changes, but it also lays to rest the notion that Maritz is out because of dropping revenues. VMware's projected record quarterly revenues is approximately $1.12 billion, which is up 22 percent from Q2 2011. VMware also announced that they expect their full-year 2012 revenues to be between $4.54 billion and $4.64 billion.
During Maritz’s tenure as CEO from 2008 to 2011, VMware continued their market dominance in the enterprise virtualization space, but they also moved from a server virtualization centric company into new technologies like the cloud, mobile, and desktop virtualization. Maritz stated, regarding his changing role, "This all means that I can devote my time to developing the strategy of EMC as it relates to big data and a new generation of cloud-oriented applications."
While not as well-known as Maritz, Gelsinger is certainly no stranger to technology having been responsible for several of Intel's enterprise product lines including their server, communications, and storage products. In looking to the future Gelsinger said, "The next generation of software defined-datacenters will be built by combining software with standardized hardware building blocks."
VMware remains the undisputed enterprise leader in virtualization, but there is no doubt that VMware faces a much more difficult challenge in the year to come with Microsoft's enhancements in their Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V virtualization platform and the strong new multi-platform private cloud components found in Microsoft's System Center management suite. Even so, VMware is not standing still and announcements around their flagship vSphere product lines are expected this August at VMworld in San Francisco.