History 2004: EMC Taps IBM Exec Jeffrey Nick as CTO

In almost all U.S. companies, the CTO is usually the number 2 or 3 person. At EMC, after CEO Joe Tucci, there are 9 EVPs, followed closely behind by 8 SVPs.

The company’s newly appointed CTO, Jeffrey Nick, surprisingly, is for the moment just a SVP, reporting to Howard Elias, EVP, corporate marketing and office of the technology, who in turn reports to Tucci.

This arrival confirms EMC’s policy of recruiting the best specialists in the field, preferably out from under the feet of the competition, to further weaken its rivals. This has been true in the past couple of years with the headhunting of Howard Elias, Mark Lewis and Rainer Erlat, in the fallout of the HP/Compaq merger.

Nick, 50, is serious catch. He spent 24 years at IBM, beginning as a software engineer and ending up managing the architecture of IBM’s on-demand initiative as well as leading Big Blue’s grid computing strategy. In the intervening years, he registered more than 80 inventions and holds more than 50 patents in computer systems technology. He was named an  IBM fellow, a rare and highly coveted distinction.

In fact, he is assuming the interim CTO position held by Elias when Lewis was promoted senior EVP of software, replacing Jim Rothnie, who is still CTO emeritus at EMC.

In his new role, he will be in charge of defining the company’s technology strategy and will work within the industry on standards.

Elsewhere at EMC, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, EVP and GM of mobile phones at Nokia, was voted to the board of EMC.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 200 on September 2004 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.

Note: After EMC, Nick became SVP and chief solutions architect at Pivotal Software, Inc.