Paul Maritz, the one-time high-ranking Microsoftee who has been CEO of VMware for the last four years, is out of a job, according to CRN, replaced by EMC COO and Intel veteran Pat Gelsinger.

Nobody’s sure if Maritz is staying or going. Gelsinger has been bruited as a possible replacement for EMC CEO Joe Tucci when he finally retires but now it’s speculated that Maritz could replace Tucci.

Back when Bill Gates was still running Microsoft, Maritz was said to be the third most powerful executive there after Steve Ballmer.

GigaOm is also running a story saying VMware, a subsidiary of EMC, is considering spinning out its open source, increasingly cloud-neutral Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service as a separate EMC subsidiary along with EMC’s Greenplum Hadoop/Big Data business and the nascent VMware- EMC Infrastructure-as-a-Service joint venture Project Rubicon.

It thinks that Tod Nielsen, co-president of VMware’s application platform business, or Mark Lucovsky, VP of engineering in charge of Cloud Foundry, could be put in charge on the spin-out, aimed at building a cloud computing services company to compete with Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

GigaOm waded in after the CRN story broke saying there were rumors Maritz had been offered the chairmanship of Cloud Foundry. It also suggested there are substantive reasons why Maritz may be out.

It said, “If Maritz is indeed out at the company after four years at the helm, it may be because VMware has let its lead on virtualization – its core business – slide while pursuing enterprise applications and higher-level software…. Instead of buying things like Zimbra from Yahoo, VMware needed to keep its eye on the management of scaled-out enterprise infrastructure, focusing on building software to monitor and manage multiple cloud environments and span hybrid clouds.”

Last week EMC said its vice-chairman Bill Teuber would get responsibility for strategy and business development in emerging markets while Bill Scannell replaces him as president of global sales and customer operations.

• Cloud Foundry vs Google App Engine
• Maritz Goes to EMC, Gelsinger To Run VMware