It's official. Howard Elias, veteran storage executive at Hewlett-Packard, has joined the exodus of HP storage executives to competitor EMC.
When HP confirmed that Elias, who took on the role of senior vice president of business management and operations at HP in May, had left the company in mid-September, rumors circulated that EMC was his destination.
That move was confirmed by EMC executives who said on Wednesday that Elias joined that company as executive vice president of new ventures. In that position, Elias will report to Joe Tucci, president and CEO of EMC.
Elias, 46, was unavailable for comment, an EMC spokesperson said, adding that Elias will manage EMC's office of technology, which consists of managers of each of the company's businesses as well as its own core staff.
As such, Elias' strategic responsibility is to identify new business opportunities and then work with David Goulden, who runs EMC's New Business Development Group, to find the right partners and acquisition targets to execute on those opportunities, the spokesperson said.
Elias also will be responsible for EMC's Centera line of arrays, which store fixed content,files and documents that cannot be modified or deleted for a specified amount of time because of regulatory or compliance issues.
The EMC spokesperson said Elias is expected to move to Massachusetts from Texas as a result of taking his new position.
Before May, Elias headed up network storage at HP, but then the vendor's storage and server operations were combined to form the Enterprise Storage and Servers (ESS) business unit.
Elias' departure is the latest sign of possible turmoil in HP's storage business. In July, Mark Sorenson, HP's vice president of network storage solutions software, left the company to join EMC, following in the footsteps of his former boss, Mark Lewis, who made the same move a year earlier.
Lewis headed Compaq storage at the time of the HP acquisition but left shortly thereafter for EMC--in part because Elias, who had headed Compaq storage in the late 1990s, was reappointed to that position after the acquisition, channel sources said.
