Former top Microsoft exec Paul Maritz is moving up the ladder at EMC, taking over the chief executive position at its VMWare subsidiary from founder Diane Greene.

Maritz joined EMC as head of its cloud computing effort in February after it bought Pi, his Seattle cloud computing startup.

Today EMC announced that Greene is leaving her position as VMWare president and CEO and Maritz is taking her place.

The press release quote from Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC and chairman of VMWare, praised Greene and said Maritz "is a leader in the software industry. He has decades of experience building one of the greatest franchises in software history, Windows. Paul was instrumental as part of the core executive leadership team in building much of Microsoft's success."