Cisco and EMC have appointed Michael Capellas to lead their joint private-cloud venture.

Capellas' most recent job was CEO at First Data Corporation, but he is better known as the former president and CEO of Compaq who oversaw the sale of the computer maker to HP in 2002.

Following the acquisition, Capellas served as president at HP for about seven months before becoming chairman of the board at former WorldCom (currently MCI), the large US telecommunications firm.

In his new role, Capellas will lead Cisco and EMC's Virtual Computing Environment coalition and be the CEO of Acadia, a joint venture between two IT giants, with additional investment from Intel and VMware (majority-owned by EMC).

VCE and Acadia are complementary entities, the former being the maker of the private cloud infrastructure solution Vblock and the latter selling and deploying the solution for clients.


Capellas: "There's never been a better time to be in the heart of the industry helping customers take advantage of the next great wave of information technology innovation, the private cloud."

Vblock is a full IT infrastructure package, consisting of Cisco Unified Computing System (servers and network gear), EMC storage equipment and VMware virtualization platform.

The companies announced Vblock, VCE and Acadia simultaneously in November.

"We are very fortunate to have someone of Michael Capellas' stature lead VCE and take on the role of CEO for Acadia," EMC CEO Joe Tucci said in a statement. "With more than three decades of experience, Michael has made a career out of leading and transforming large corporations.

Today, IT departments are undergoing their own transformation as they begin their journey to the private cloud to reduce their computing costs and have more flexibility in the way they deploy applications."

To date, 45 VCE partners and six system integrators are selling Vblock.

Cisco estimates total market size for private cloud infrastructure solutions to reach $85 billion by 2015.