Tod Nielsen

Maybe it's time for VMware to officially set up shop in Seattle. Today, the virtualization spin out from EMC announced that former Microsoft and Crossgain executive Tod Nielsen is joining the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company as chief operating officer.

He will report directly to former Microsoft vice president and Seattle resident Paul Maritz, who took over the CEO post at VMware in July. In fact, EMC -- the majority shareholder of VMware -- has been making some very interesting moves in the Seattle area recently.

Just last week, we reported that EMC purchased some of the assets of Seattle open source startup SourceLabs. We've also reported on the creation of Seattle-based Decho, an online file storage and backup service created in November through the combination EMC businesses such as Maritz's Pi Corp. and American Fork, Utah-based Mozy.

Nielsen most recently served as president and CEO of Borland Software and also worked at Oracle and BEA Systems. In addition to his 12 year run at Microsoft, the 43-year-old tech exec is best known in Seattle for his role at Crossgain. The Redmond startup  gained notoriety back in 2000  because Microsoft attempted to quell its progress by enforcing non-compete agreements against many of its workers who previously held jobs at the sofware giant.

VMware is a huge business, with 20,000 employees, 120,000 customers and 2007 revenue of $1.3 billion. In that regard, it is kind of interesting that the company didn't already have a COO in place.

We've also heard some rumblings that Maritz may eventually get the itch to do something else. (In the press release, Maritz says he plans to devote more of his time to the product strategy and development.)

Bringing on Nielsen -- a proven executive who has run a publicly-traded company before in Borland -- might be a step in that direction.  

And speaking of Austin, Texas-based Borland, in addition to Nielsen's resignation, it announced the reduction of 15 percent of its staff today.