Storage exec jumps ship from HP to EMC
Storage exec jumps ship from HP to EMC
Storage system vendor EMC has announced the appointment of former Hewlett-Packard executive Howard Elias, who becomes the latest in a string of high-level HP managers to have left the vendor for a rival operator.
Elias joins Mark Sorenson, former Vice President of HP's storage software division, and John Jackson, former Director of Business Continuity Services at HP, to have left the company in recent weeks. Jackson was only in his position at HP for four months before moving to rival IBM, where he now heads their business continuity and recovery services group.
Elias had been Senior Vice President of Business Management and Operations for HP's Enterprise Systems Group. He joins EMC as Executive Vice President of New Ventures, and will report to Joe Tucci, EMC's President and CEO.
Prior to the acquisition of Compaq by HP in 2002, Howard spent a year as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Compaq's Business Critical Server Group and three years as Vice President and General Manager of the company's Storage Products Division. He has also held various senior business and product management positions at Digital, AST Research and Tandy Corporation.
Tucci said of the appointment: "Howard is a recognised leader throughout the IT industry and brings a wealth of experience that will help EMC deliver on our vision of becoming the ultimate information lifecycle management company."
A spokesman for HP dismissed the idea that the recent loss of senior executives meant that the company was heading for trouble, emphasising the point by highlighting recent figures from analyst group IDC on worldwide disk storage revenue in Q2 2003, which show HP with a market revenue of US$1.26 billion, down 0.1 percent from Q2 2002, with EMC's disk storage system revenue down by 6.7 percent to US$602 million.
However an EMC spokesman contested HP's claim, saying the figures quoted by HP did not include the EMC storage systems sold by Dell which, when taken into account, actually give EMC a year on year rise of 7 percent for the quarter, with US$762 million in revenue.
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