Sam Ramji, who was named CEO of Cloud Foundry last year, has left the open source project to take a senior executive position in Diane Greene’s cloud group at Google.
Cloud Foundry indirectly announced Ramji’s departure today by announcing the appointment of Abby Kearns as executive director. Kearns had been the project’s vice president of strategy.
Earlier reports and one source close to Cloud Foundry pegged Ramji’s destination as Google — which Google has now confirmed. He’ll be joining Greene to run the business now known as Google Cloud.
Greene — a founder and former CEO of VMware and a Google board member — joined Google a year ago. Part of her task is to play catch-up to Amazon Web Services (AWS), partly by sparking enterprises’ interest in Google Cloud.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Cloud Foundry has been targeting those enterprises. The project was launched by VMware in 2011 as a platform for running enterprise applications in the cloud.