Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz Steps Down, Rob Mee Takes Over

Paul Maritz, the former Microsoft executive who has since 2012 been the CEO of Pivotal, the software and data analytics division of the storage and IT giant EMC, has stepped down from that position, the company said.

Maritz will remain on Pivotal’s board and will be the company’s executive chairman.

Pivotal is a relatively new member of the EMC federation, assembled as the result of a series of acquisitions by that company over the last decade or so, and includes EMC’s core storage business, as well as the software company VMware. Rob Mee, the new CEO, helped start Pivotal Labs, a software consulting outfit, in 1989. EMC acquired it in 2012 and combined it with a few other companies and turned it into Pivotal.

And while it’s not quite big enough for this yet, EMC’s CEO Joe Tucci has publicly said he’d like one day to partially spin Pivotal out as a public company in the same way the company did with VMware. EMC acquired VMware in 2003 for $625 million, then spun out about 15 percent of its shares in a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Today, VMware is worth more than $37 billion and constitutes about 80 percent of the value of its parent. (Maritz is still on VMware’s board of directors.)

By stepping down now, Maritz has officially taken himself out of contention in the race to succeed Tucci. As he told the Wall Street Journal today: “My operational career is over.”

To be sure, Maritz was already a dark horse in that race. The main contenders are VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and David Goulden, the CEO of EMC’s main storage business, which it calls information infrastructure.

Maritz appeared onstage earlier this year at the Code conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. At the time, he said, “Everything that’s going to be made, from your socks to a jet engine, is going to be attached to the Internet.” He also said, “Companies need to learn how to catch people in the act of doing something and affect the outcome.” If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth watching the interview; the video is below.

EMC’s Goulden will be speaking at our Code/Enterprise: New York event on Sept. 29. Tickets are going fast so sign up now.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.