Capellas to lead Cisco-EMC Acadia joint venture
Michael Capellas, former CEO of Compaq, MCI and First Data, has a new gig: Being the front man for the Cisco and EMC Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition
This coalition---a partnership between Cisco and EMC with investments from Intel and VMware---is called Acadia. Capellas will be CEO of the venture. In a nutshell, Acadia is aimed at next-gen data centers that are designed to deliver private cloud infrastructure. The goal is to give customers the advantages of one-throat to choke in terms of support without relying on a single vendor. Acadia calls this approach "best of bread reference architecture."
In his new role, Capellas will be talking cloud computing, data management as well as data center architecture. For a data center newcomer like Cisco riding shotgun with EMC and VMware is a nice way to go. Meanwhile, Capellas brings a lot of credibility to the VCE coalition and can court new partners.
Related: First Data names Forehand CEO; Capellas steps back
- Michael Capellas has landed
- Cisco, EMC, VMware announce joint integrated datacenter venture
- Data center survey: Cisco's server push sparks interest; VMware, EMC, NetApp shine
EMC and Cisco said they are seeing strong demand for its Vblock, pre-integrated technology packages for virtualized data centers. VCE has 45 partners and six integrators selling Vblocks and 2000 other partners in the certification phase. The Vblock tethers Cisco's UCS servers with EMC storage gear and VMware software.
Capellas will report to EMC CEO Joe Tucci, Cisco CEO John Chambers and Acadia's board of directors.