Paul Maritz

After successfully making VMware into one of the biggest, most important enterprise software companies, Maritz has taken on a new challenge for VMware s parent company, EMC: to create a cloud computing/big data spinoff. He s now the CEO of Pivotal. In geek speak it is a platform as a service for building big data apps. In simpler terms, it intersects two big trends: cloud computing and big data, meaning it will let app developers write the type of apps that use lots data and will then host those apps.