Once again Condo Protego had a full team attending EMC World in Las Vegas, last week. There were numerous highlights, with so many new announcements and now pretty much full clarity on how the new organization will be structured once the merger with DELL is completed.
From a personal perspective there were two very poignant moments during the conference, and both involved Joe Tucci, the Chairman and CEO of EMC. Prior to Michael Dell announcing his vision and structure for the new organization, Joe effectively handed over ‘his baby’ and spoke of his transition towards a peripheral role. Then again later that same day at the Global Partner Summit, a subset of the main EMC World event, he talked about his personal future plans for life after EMC. At both events, he was given a very long and warm standing ovation, so fitting for someone who has done so much for the company and the industry.
I remember when Joe first joined EMC. As an EMC Sales Manager, I was attending the EMC Global kickoff in New Orleans in January 2000. As I recall Joe had just joined as COO and presumptive CEO to the outgoing Mike Ruettgers, and was given a pretty rough time by a number of the other speakers at the event. Remember this was an EMC running high on the success of 10 years of stellar growth, but with only one product, the Symmetrix high end storage system. EMC had just acquired Data General to get its hands on the mid market Clariion(*), but that too was seen as something of an imposter.
Well of course Joe changed the whole face of EMC, ensuring that it continued such stellar growth, but through a wide range of remarkable acquisitions, and a transition from a single product company to one with a huge portfolio of industry leading solutions, including of course VMWare and RSA.
There is no doubt that Michael Dell has made the right choice, he wants the industry leading hardware solutions company, and by buying EMC and merging his current DELL products, he fills in the numerous previous gaps in the complete portfolio with all the leading products in one swoop. Even if he had bought a dozen different companies to fill the gaps, none of them would be market leaders, which he got from EMC. This is the true testament to Joe Tucci.
In his keynote speech, referred to above, he said that he hoped to get around to meeting many of us during the course of the week, and as per the picture below, Savitha (Chief Operation Officer) and I were very proud to share a few minutes with him during yet another event, one evening later in the week.
On behalf of everyone at Condo Protego I wish Joe a very happy transition to his new life; one would normally say retirement, but from his own words it’s clear this gentleman of the industry has no plans to sit quietly in a chair in his garden, and it’s fair to assume he will remain busier than most ‘regular’ people.
(*) The Clariion of course became the VNX, and now after several iterations in that guise has become the EMC Unity, a system that has continued to transform, in some ways shadowing the way Joe changed EMC.
From Left to Right: Savitha Bhaskar COO, Condo Protego, Joe Tucci Chairman and CEO, EMC Corporation, Andrew Calthorpe CEO, Condo Protego at EMC World 2016.
