VMware Exits Continue as Cloud Exec Clayville Heads to AWS

Mike Clayville, VMware’s (VMW) former Cloud Infrastructure Product Marketing vice president, became the third exec to exit the virtualization kingpin in recent weeks, joining cloud computing giant and rival Amazon (AMZN) Web Services (AWS) as the company’s new Worldwide Commercial Sales vice president.

Clayville’s switch to AWS, which was first revealed in a NetworkWorld report, comes amid Amazon adding some 200 enterprise sales reps in the last two years. The company is gearing up perhaps to pursue bigger enterprise customers not just for its public cloud business but also with an eye to challenging VMware’s private cloud dominance, as speculated by Business Insider.

Clayville, who also handled North American Sales at VMware, adds an experienced sales exec to the mix familiar with the enterprise market. Hmmm…..

Two other high-level execs walked on VMware last week—Tod Nielsen, who ran Cloud Foundry and then moved over to EMC/VMware spinoff Pivotal, left for the chief executive slot at Heroku, a Salesforce.com-owned platform-as-service (PaaS) provider. And Jerry Chen, longtime VMware Cloud and Application Services vice president, departed for a partner slot at venture capital firm Greylock Partners. Steve Herrod, VMware’s former chief technology officer and 12-year company stalwart, in a similar move, preceded Chen’s departure to the VC community when he joined General Catalyst this past January.

Of course, the most prominent exit from VMware came at the top, when Paul Maritz, former chief executive, left to run Pivotal, but that’s not really the same thing.

As reported by NetworkWorld, Clayville’s updated LinkedIn profile doesn’t offer any details about his new AWS post, but the dots connect rather easily to an Amazon job posting in which the Commercial Sales group is described as directed at Fortune 2000 and midmarket customers—which, in all likelihood, is Clayville’s job description.

VMware currently is prepping its vCloud Hybrid service to debut in Q3 of this year, with plans to launch it through channel partners.