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By Mel Duvall
Cisco and EMC have named Michael Capellas, a long-time industry executive, to head up their joint cloud computing venture.
The companies announced this week that Capellas, a Cisco director and former chief executive officer of HP, would take up the helm of Acadia, their joint venture that was announced last November. The goal of Acadia, which is being backed by a group of industry players under the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition, is to develop solutions to help enterprises more quickly and more easily virtualize their data centers and to move towards private cloud infrastructures.
"We are very fortunate to have someone of Michael Capellas' stature lead VCE and take on the role of CEO for Acadia," EMC chairman and CEO Joe Tucci said in a statement. "With more than three decades of experience, Michael has made a career out of leading and transforming large corporations."
Capellas does, in fact, have one of the strongest resumes in the industry. In addition to serving as a director at Cisco, he was most recently the CEO of First Data Corporation, a global provider of electronic commerce and payment processing. Previously, he served as CEO of telecommunications giant MCI, and as president and CEO of HP following the merger of Compaq with HP. His resume also includes stints at Oracle, SAP, and oil field services company Schlumberger.
The appointment comes at a time when the companies say they are seeing strong market demand for their Vblock offering, a pre-integrated, pre-tested package for fully virtualized data centers. The VCE coalition, which also includes Intel and VMware, says it has secured 45 partners and six system integrators to market Vblocks. Some 200 additional partners are in the certification phase.
The companies estimate that the total market for private cloud infrastructure could reach $85 billion by 2015.
For his part Capellas said he chose to take up the leadership of Acadia because he sees it as an opportunity to be part of another "great wave of information technology innovation."
"With unmatched talent, financial resources and industry-leading technologies from three visionary companies, we can change the face of IT," he said a statement.
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