EMC lures away Intel's Gelsinger

EMC has remade its management team by luring a high-ranking executive away from Intel, potentially setting up a succession process to replace chairman and CEO Joe Tucci, who will stay at EMC through 2012.

EMC announced that Pat Gelsinger, a 30-year veteran of Intel, has joined EMC as president and COO in charge of several product divisions, including EMC's information storage, RSA security, content management and archiving, and Ionix IT management.

EMC also promoted Howard Elias to the role of president and COO in charge of EMC's information infrastructure and cloud services division. Gelsinger and Elias will serve on the newly expanded executive office of the chairman, which also includes Tucci, Vice Chairman Bill Teuber and Executive Vice President and CFO David Goulden.

Gelsinger, 48, and Elias, 52, will report to Tucci. The moves could help EMC set up a succession process, based on the company's previous practices. Tucci, 62, also joined EMC as a president and COO in 2000, and became CEO in 2001.

In its announcement, EMC said Tucci has informed the company's board of directors that he will remain as chairman and CEO through 2012. The announcement does not say that Tucci will leave at the end of 2012, but the Wall Street Journal says he is expected to step down at that time.

Gelsinger was most recently senior vice president and co-general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group, which was responsible for developing the groundbreaking Nehelem processors.

“We consider ourselves highly fortunate to welcome to EMC an executive of Pat Gelsinger's stature and depth of credentials,” Tucci said in the EMC announcement. “Pat's three decades of technical and general management leadership experience will serve EMC's customers well as they build out and blend their information infrastructures to better compete, reduce costs, minimize risk, and create ever-new levels of value from their information.”

Gelsinger joined Intel in 1979 and led the Intel Labs research group and was the company's first CTO.

Elias joined EMC in 2003 from HP, where he was a senior vice president of business management and operations for the enterprise systems group. For the last three years, he was president of EMC's global services division and the Ionix IT management group.

EMC's management changes come two weeks after co-founder Richard Egan died at the age of 73 after a long battle with cancer.