Rumors: VMWare planning Cloud Foundry spinoff led by Paul Maritz

VMWare parent company EMC is planning to carve off VMWare’s non-core businesses, including its popular Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service, into a separate unit owned by EMC, according to multiple sources, including GigaOm and TechCrunch.

Paul Maritz, the former chief executive of VMWare, will head the new unit, the reports say.

The new unit will include Cloud Foundry, plus SpringSource, Gemstone, and EMC’s “big data” product, Greenplum, reports say. This would give EMC a more dedicated unit to compete with other cloud service providers, most notably the industry leaders, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. It would also allow VMWare to concentrate on its core business of server virtualization.

The rumors are an update to rumors reported in July, 2012, by GigaOm, which suggested that VMWare was about to spin off Cloud Foundry together with Greenplum and Project Rubicon, an infrastructure-as-a-service product. The new spinoff plans appear to be somewhat different, suggesting that EMC’s plans have evolved.

Maritz, a former top Microsoft executive, was the CEO of VMWare from 2008 until September 1, 2012, when former Intel executive Pat Gelsinger replaced him. Interestingly, Maritz announced his departure as CEO around the same time as the first set of rumors about a VMWare spinoff.

EMC is the majority owner of VMWare, holding 80 percent of the publicly-traded company. Separately, VMWare recently announced plans to repurchase up to $250 million of its stock.

VMWare chief technical officer Stephen Herrod spoke last week at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat 2012 conference (video), but refused to address the rumors at that time.

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