"I'm very happy to today formally hand over the custodianship of this community to Pat Gelsinger," Maritz told the audience during the opening keynote to VMworld 2012 on Monday as he ceremonially passed leadership of the virtualization titan to Gelsinger. He noted that Gelsinger, formerly the president and chief operating officer of EMC (owner of a majority stake in VMware) and before that a 30-year veteran of Intel, has been a friend and colleague for 30 years.

Turning to Gelsinger, Maritz gestured to the audience and told him, "Take good care of them."

Maritz left the stage to a standing ovation led by Gelsinger.

Filling Maritz's shoes will be no easy task. Maritz has long been a luminary of the industry. He was president and general manager of EMC's Cloud Computing Division before his appointment as CEO of VMware in 2008. Prior to that, he spent 14 years at Microsoft and was widely regarded as the third-ranking executive at the software behemoth, behind Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. He was in charge of Microsoft's desktop and server software, overseeing the development of Windows 95, Windows NT and Internet Explorer.