Michael Capellas to lead Acadia joint venture

EMC and Cisco have tapped former Compaq Computer CEO Michael Capellas to head their Acadia services joint venture, the companies said Thursday.

Acadia was created to support a partnership between EMC, Cisco and VMware announced in November called the Virtual Computing Environment coalition. As CEO of Acadia, Capellas will have overall responsibility for the VCE partnership and will report to John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco, and Joe Tucci, chairman and CEO of EMC, the companies said in a statement.

Capellas was CEO of Compaq when it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard and most recently served as CEO and chairman of First Data, a payment processing company. He also serves on Cisco's board of directors.

Acadia is a services company that will build, operate and then transfer data centers built using products, called Vblocks, that incorporate technology from all three members of the VCE coalition. Each Vblock is a modular package that consists of servers and networking components from Cisco combined with EMC storage and VMware's virtualization software. They are designed to meet specific usage requirements and to make it easier for companies to build virtualized data centers.

In the nearly six months that have passed since the VCE coalition and Acadia were announced, the companies have enlisted 45 partners and six systems integrators to sell and deploy Vblock, the statement said, adding that a further 200 partners are undergoing certification and training.