Canopy, the Atos cloud division formed in partnership with VMware and EMC, has appointed Philippe Llorens as its new CEO.

Llorens will report to Atos UK & Ireland boss Ursula Morgenstern, who is also the global head of Canopy, a cloud provider set up in 2012 by Atos, using EMC and VMware technology, including the Pivotal Cloud Foundry, to offer software, platform and infrastructure as a service (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS) to enterprises.

Canopy is a joint vendutre, but services giant Atos is the lead partner. Its cloud offerings are based on VMware technology with EMC storage and the VCE hardware modules which take in Cisco networking.

Cloud canopy covered

Canopy has grown rapidly and now employs 1500 people. It has four multi-tenant cloud hubs from which it serves 56,000 virtual desktops and 390,000 cloud users of Microsoft Sharepoint. Canopy has 13,000 virtual servers, half of which are serving cloud infrastructure, according to the Canopy site.

“I am excited to be joining Canopy which offers clients the complete cloud portfolio to support them on their journey to becoming a digital business tomorrow,” said a statemenet form Llorens. “We have an excellent basis on which to further strengthen our business and I am looking forward to working with the Canopy team and our clients.”

France-based Atos acquired the venerable French IT firm Bull in 2014, for €620 million, to create a European tech giant.

Llorens ran EMEA sales for Compuware, and previously worked for Lotus Development, as well as GFI, Digital Equipment Corp, Thales, HP, and Sun.

Llorens’ predecessor Jacques Pommeraud is off to Salesforce, where he will sport the vaguely sinister taitle “senior vice president of success services”.