Former HP President and Compaq CEO
Michael Capellas will lead the Cisco, EMC
and VMware effort to change the architecture in data centers with the
technology to ease deployment of private clouds.
The move comes as the war between Cisco and HP to dominate the evolving
virtualized data center has escalated
on all fronts.
Capellas will lead the Virtual Computing Environment coalition (VCE), formed by
Cisco, EMC and VMware last
fall and will also serve as the CEO of
Acadia, a complementary Cisco-EMC joint
venture with Intel and VMware.
In his role as the VCE coalition leader, Capellas, 55, will drive customer and
partner adoption of the coalition’s IT solutions, including Vblock
packages—preintegrated, pretested technology packages for fully virtualized
data centers.
He is also charged with attracting additional partners to the coalition, the
companies said in a statement announcing his appointment. VCE has 45 partners
and six system integrators that are currently selling Vblocks, and some 200
additional partners are in the certification phase, according to Cisco and EMC.
The companies estimate the total market for private cloud infrastructure,
including the elements that can be addressed by the VCE coalition, to be $85
billion by 2015.
Capellas will also lead Acadia, the joint venture formed
to build solutions and then transfer them to customers.
Capellas will report to Joe Tucci, EMC
chairman and CEO, and John Chambers, Cisco
chairman and CEO, and the Acadia
board.
"With more than three decades of experience, Michael has made a career out
of leading and transforming large corporations,” said Tucci, in a prepared
statement. “Today, IT departments are undergoing their own transformation as
they begin their journey to the private cloud to reduce their computing costs
and have more flexibility in the way they deploy applications. I believe
Michael is the perfect executive to build added confidence and trust in the
power of Cisco, EMC and our partners to help
them along the way."