EMC Hires Former Symantec, Veritas Executive As First CMO

By Joseph F. Kovar, CRN
March 15, 2010 12:16 PM ET

Former Symantec and Oracle executive and EMC basher Jeremy Burton is now EMC's first-ever chief marketing officer, making him the company's second recent high-profile executive appointment after former Intel executive Pat Gelsinger.

Storage vendor EMC on Monday said it has appointed Burton as executive vice president and CMO, reporting to EMC's Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci.

Burton was most recently the president and CEO of Serena Software, which he joined in 2007.

However, he is best-known as the face of EMC arch-rival Symantec, where he was group president of Symantec's Security and Data Management business unit. He joined Symantec with that company's acquisition of storage vendor Veritas, where he served as CMO. Prior to Veritas, he spent about a decade with Oracle.

Burton's hire represents the first time that EMC has had a CMO, and comes about two months before the start of the annual EMC World conference.

Long-time attendees of the old Veritas Vision conference might remember Burton in part for some of the best videos ever produced for an industry event, and which focused on competing against his new employer, EMC.

At Veritas Vision 2004, he introduced "Utility Jones," a spoof of the Indiana Jones movies in which the hero had to fight enemies which included references to EMC and Microsoft in order to save mission-critical applications and IT professionals.

The year before, he introduced "Enter the Matrix," a spoof of the Matrix movie series, to emphasize Veritas' storage automation capabilities.

Burton is the second high-profile hire for EMC in the past half-year.

The company in September hired Pat Gelsinger from Intel as part of a series of executive changes aimed at ensuring a smooth leadership path for the storage company's future.

Gelsinger, who until recently was senior vice president and co-general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, joined the company as president and COO for EMC information infrastructure products.

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