VMware Cloud Foundry Exec Departs, But Says Timing 'Coincidental'

McCrory, who started his new job Monday, explained in a blog post that the timing of his departure -- coming three weeks after VMware announced that CEO Paul Maritz will be moving to a strategic role at EMC -- is coincidental and does not reflect a lack of confidence in VMware's direction.

"VMware and Cloud Foundry are both things that I believe in and think they have bright futures," McCrory said in the blog post. "I expect great things from VMware and especially the Cloud Foundry team over the next couple of years."

[Related: VMware's Cloud Foundry Turns One, Gets New Development Tools ]

McCrory, who joined VMware in March 2011, said he will be taking part in VMworld, which is being held in San Francisco from Aug. 26-30, only this time as a customer of VMware as opposed to an employee. Prior to joining VMware, McCrory was founder and CTO at Hyper9, a virtualization vendor that was acquired by network management vendor SolarWinds in January 2011.

VMware launched the Cloud Foundry beta last April, touting it as a simple-to-use platform for building cloud applications with support for a wide range of development frameworks. In an interview with CRN last June, Maritz described Cloud Foundry as a play for the hearts and minds of younger developers.

"We're trying to shoot ahead and take some risks," Maritz told CRN at the time. "We think there are big changes coming in both how applications are developed and how they're provisioned and consumed. And this is the time to try and get ahead."

VMware lured away two of Google's top engineers -- Mark Lucovsky and Derek Collison -- to build Cloud Foundry. Lucovsky, technical director at VMware, is still with the company, but Collison left in February to launch a cloud platform startup called Apcera.

VMware celebrated Cloud Foundry's one-year anniversary in April this year by announcing that Cloud9, CollabNet, ServiceMesh, Soasta and eBay subsidiary X.commerce are now using the platform in various capacities. VMware also unveiled Cloud Foundry BOSH, calling it "an open source tool chain for release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management of large-scale distributed services."

PUBLISHED AUG. 7, 2012