VMware's executive lineup is starting to look very familiar to anyone who followed Microsoft in the 1990s. The virtualization company today said it hired Richard McAniff, a 21-year Microsoft veteran, as its new executive vice president and chief development officer. There he joins former Microsoft executives including VMware CEO Paul Maritz and Tod Nielsen, VMware's chief operating officer.

McAniff spent much of his career in Microsoft Office most recently as a corporate vice president. He was involved in products including Excel, Access, Office business intelligence, and Web components for SharePoint Portal Server. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley notes that he left the Redmond company quietly at the end of last year.

"He is very entrepreneurial," said Mike Koss, the founder of Startpad, who has known McAniff for 10 years and worked for him at Microsoft. "Richard is the kind of guy who has fire in the belly. ... He was looking for one more big project, one more big challenge."

One of McAniff's interests is cloud computing, and he cited that area in the news release announcing his new job.

“From the introduction of VMware Workstation in 1999 to giving customers a clear path to cloud computing, VMware has clearly established itself as an innovation leader,” McAniff said. “I am excited to join the VMware team at an important time in the company’s history."

Microsoft and VMware are also competitors in the market virtualization technology, which, among other things, lets companies run multiple operating systems on a single computer server. It should be interesting to see whether the growing Microsoft heritage in the VMware executive ranks ultimately ends up factoring into the competition between the companies.

[John Cook contributed to this post, speaking to Mike Koss this afternoon at the Northwest Entrepreneur Network's First Look Forum.]