As senior vice president and chief technology officer at EMC
Corp. (NYSE: EMC), James B. Rothnie arguably holds the future of the
company in his hands. He is, after all, responsible for EMCs entire product
strategy at a crucial juncture in the companys history.
Analysts have said that the storage behemoth must reinvent itself to
focus on selling highly profitable software and services in order to avoid
the perils of a commoditized storage hardware market. Rothnie says networked
storage will form a major part of this repositioning.
And hes not sitting on his hands. For the six months ending in June, EMCs revenues rose 10 percent to $4.37 billion. (Nice one, Jim!) The increase came courtesy of higher revenue from software and network-attached storage products.
Of course, EMCs net income fell 33 percent during the same period to $507.7 million. (Oops!) However, a lot of that was down to James spending a ton o
money on the R&D necessary to develop EMCs new product lines so no harm, no
foul, we say.
Yes, theres no doubt about it: James is a Grand Fromage in the storage
world. A Gouda, if you will. Or maybe a big old Gorgonzola; you know, the ones that come in the humongous wheels [ed. note: Get on with it!]
