Joe Tucci
Published for the Week Of November 15, 2004
EMC president and Chief Executive Joe Tucci fights just as hard for education reform as he does for storage market share.
When Tucci, who heads the Business Roundtable task force on education and the workforce, once met with U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) on education initiatives, he got right to the heart of the matter. He told Kennedy the organization, comprised of some 150 CEOs, was not interested in feel-good programs but rather wise investments with a proven return.
“He cuts to the chase,” says Susan Traiman, the Roundtable’s director of education and workforce policy. “He is a no-nonsense person. He very clearly and crisply analyzes a problem and gets right to the core of it.”
The 57-year-old CEO has applied that same no-nonsense approach to transforming EMC from a struggling storage hardware vendor battered by the dot.com collapse into a robust, multiplatform management software company with some of the hottest products in the market. Tucci accomplished what seemed like the impossible in his usual no-frills fashion, buying 12 software companies since he joined EMC nearly four years ago. Among them were VMware, Legato, Documentum and Dantz.
Solution providers say Tucci has brought a channel focus to the company that has made EMC a much more attractive partner. “Under his rein, EMC has decided to move into the SMB space and embrace the channel,” says Rory Sanchez, president of SLPowers, West Palm Beach, Fla. “It really is a big turnaround.”
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Tucci’s channel-centric push has paid off handsomely for EMC. Revenue grew 34 percent to $5.87 billion over the first three quarters of 2004. More importantly, Tucci’s “information life-cycle management” vision, which marries content and storage management, has turned EMC into an innovation leader.
“We have a healthy lead in the all-important area of functionality,” Tucci says. “The best news is that EMC has a faster cycle of innovation.”