Pivotal Software CEO Paul Maritz just stepped down after building a $100 million business
Current CEO Paul Maritz is stepping down to make way for Rob Mee.
Mee was the founder of Pivotal Labs, a software development startup that EMC snapped up in 2012 to form the foundation of its then-new spin-off.
Meanwhile, Paul Maritz's 35-year-long technology career has included stints as a senior executive at Microsoft and CEO of VMware. Maritz left VMware - also majority-owned by EMC - in 2012 to head up the Pivotal spinoff, and was replaced by Pat Gelsinger, who still holds the position today.
Maritz will remain on Pivotal Software's board as its executive chairman, and advise some of the companies in his investment portfolio, but this departure marks the end of his time in the day-to-day operations of enterprise tech companies.
Pivotal itself is something of a Silicon Valley success story: Maritz wrote in a blog entry that Pivotal's Cloud Foundry business, where it sells software that makes it easier for developers to build enterprise applications, is on track to make $100 million this year.
"This speaks both to the value that customers place on our Pivotal Labs team not only do work for them, but with them, allowing them to see first-hand how modern product development can be done, and the value that they see in breadth, quality and usefulness of the software platforms that we have been developing," Maritz writes.
In the meanwhile, Pivotal's 1,700 employees include plenty of tech's best and brightest, including engineers formerly of NASA, eBay, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services. Pivotal Labs counts companies like Best Buy, BMW, and Twitter as customers. Meanwhile, GE bought a 10% stake in Pivotal back in 2013.