EMC-Cisco-Intel Startup Acadia Picks Former HP CEO as CEO

Back on Nov. 3, 2009, Cisco Systems, VMware, EMC and Intel formed the Acadia shared-equity startup in order to create and market modular cloud computing systems built on Cisco’s Virtual Computing Environment.

The partnership uses hardware and software from those four companies — plus a list of other non-equity participants, including BMC [for its management controls] and Accenture [for integration] — to produce cloud computing modules called vBlocks. vBlocks then can be used to build private cloud systems a little at a time.

Acadia opened for business Jan. 1, 2010, but hasn’t had a certified leader until now. On May 5, the Acadia board of directors announced that it has found the man to lead this venture. He is Cisco board member and former HP and Compaq CEO Michael Capellas, 55.

Capellas was born to be a CEO. He most recently served as Chairman and CEO of First Data Corp. and at one time was Chairman and CEO of MCI. According to the official announcement from the company, he will report — in this exact order — to EMC Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci, Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers, and the Acadia board of directors.

The Station is wondering who’s really running this partnership, which is a direct and proprietary competitor to IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle/Sun Dell.

Cisco came forth with the VCE idea in late 2009 — which is a refinement of the Cisco Unified Computing System that was announced eight months earlier, in March 2009. The UCS features a new, network-centric Cisco server-switch combo that is a key component in the VCE. But since then, EMC and VMware have apparently taken control of this whole deal.

Never mind that EMC owns about 80 percent of VMware, which means all the storage, security [EMC also owns RSA, which is also involved] and virtualization in this system comes from one entity.

The way the official announcement of Capellas’ appointment is written says a lot. Corporate worker bees labor hard and long to get exactly these messages across in exactly the way they want to present them.

The way we read it, Acadia and Capellas report first to Joe Tucci — President, CEO, Chairman and otherwise the Really Big Cheese — at EMC. The others? Well, Capellas reports to them, too.