bring more unity of vision to the Hopkinton company’s diverse portfolio, which has exploded over the past five years with the acquisition of roughly 40 companies.
“The totality of what EMC information infrastructure means to our customers worldwide has never been more critical,” Tucci said in a press statement today. “Pat’s three decades of technical and general management leadership experience will serve EMC’s customers well as they build out and blend their information infrastructures to better compete, reduce costs, minimize risk, and create ever-new levels of value from their information.”
But there may also be a simpler logic to Gelsinger’s hiring. EMC has spent years standardizing the architecture of its flagship Symmetrix storage servers around Intel’s Xeon processors, and the majority of VMware customers use its software to virtualize Intel-based servers. So it can’t hurt EMC to have a senior executive on board who is intimately familiar with Intel’s products and its technology roadmap. (Below, see an interesting YouTube video from last spring in which Gelsinger talks about the collaboration between Intel and EMC around V-Max, a variety of Intel-powered Symmetrix server that can be interconnected in huge pools to form a cloud computing infrastructure.)
EMC had one more announcement today: Tucci has informed EMC’s board that he will stay on as chairman and CEO through 2012. Meaning at least 2012—the announcement is in no way an indication that Tucci intends to retire at that time, according to Gallant.
