History 2002: Compaq’s Howard Elias Heads Storage at New HP Organization

If anyone doubted it, we have a clear sign recognizing the superiority of Compaq’s storage activity over that of Hewlett-Packard.

In the new organizational chart for the merged company, Howard Elias, with his nomination as head of the reunified Network Storage Solutions (NSS) group returns to his first love, since he was once VP and GM of Compaq enterprise storage group before heading the company’s business critical server group.

Nora Denzel, meanwhile, who was VP and GM of HP’s worldwide storage organization, will now run the software group. Both will report to Peter Blackmore, executive VP of HP’s enterprise systems group.

Mark Lewis, who was VP and GM of Compaq enterprise storage group before the merger, drops ever-so slightly down a notch, since he now reports to Elias as VP WW marketing and solutions.

At the same level and thus also reporting to Elias are Roger Archibald for infrastructure, Neal Clapper for online storage, Frank Harbist for nearline storage, and Mark Sorenson for storage software. Mike Feinberg is the CTO for NSS. Tom Nierman, Olaf Swantee, Charlie Trentacosti and Mikinori Furuya are in charge of Americas, EMEA, Asia and Japan, respectively.

Elias, 44, attended Wayne State University and Lawrence Institute of Technology. He spent more than 17 years with Tandy in a variety of management positions, and was president of Grid Systems. He then was VP of WW marketing and GM of the desktop products division for AST Research. He joined Digital Equipment in 1994 as VP of WW business segments, overseeing Digital’s PC server, commercial desktop and mobile product families. Subsequently, he was in charge of the NT business units. In 1998, the year of the DEC acquisition, he succeeded Vic Mahadevan as VP and GM of Compaq’s storage products division, successfully guiding the integration of StorageWorks into Compaq. In 2001 , he replaced Bill Heil at the head of the business critical server group. No doubt his prior experience was a key to his new posting: once again, he will have to oversee the integration of two storage group.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 172 on May 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.