History 2002: Howard Elias VP and GM, HP’s Network Storage Solutions

Editor’s note following an interview of Howard Elias VP and GM, HP’s Network Storage Solutions: “We intend to be profitable in 2003.“

In the nearly 15 years that we’ve published this newsletter, I’ve never succeeded in angering someone as much as I angered Howard Elias.

In his defense, he’d just gotten off a plane from Houston, TX, to Paris, France, after what was no doubt an all-too-brief Thanksgiving break.

He was in much better form, for instance, when we interviewed him 2 years ago.

Generally speaking, our aim at StorageNewsletter.com is to try to cajole storage executives to part with a few ounces of insight into their strategy, maybe even to land a minor scoop on unannounced innovations or directions for the companies we regularly cover in these pages.

In exchange, the executive has an opportunity to market the company’s approach to, well, marketing.

Our game usually involves confronting the corporate guy with what the company is doing right, or wrong, what the competition may be doing better or worse, and to ask (usually in vain) for various break-outs of product sales and revenues.

I give it a try, and my interview is more than welcome to say “I can’t comment on that.” Generally, this seems to work. I come away with a morsel or 2 of news, and the executive in question goes away with some valuable column inches.

In this case, however, it seems that Elias might have mistakenly thought we were working for him. Apparently, we didn’t ask the questions he felt like answering, and we had the temerity to want something more than a love sonnet to his customers.

On a technical note, we had interviewed him with a writer from the French IT periodical, 01 Informatique. Some of the answers Elias gave were in response to his questions. In case you think we journalists had an unfair advantage, Elias was flanked by Olaf Swantee, Compaq NSS director for EMEA..

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 179 on December 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.