EMC appoints John Roese as CTO

EMC Corporation has appointed John Roese, a 20-year IT industry veteran, as its new chief technology officer. Roese will be reporting to Jeremy Burton, executive vice president of Product Operations and Marketing, and will play a key role in shaping EMC’s technology strategy around cloud, big data and trusted IT.

"John brings to EMC a unique blend of experience spanning the entire breadth of IT systems from silicon all the way up through networking, storage, servers and virtualization. In addition, he has directed product development in enterprise, carrier and consumer markets. At heart, John is a true technologist, but he is also a proven strategist and general manager with extraordinary vision and operational expertise within very large, complex organizations,” Jeremy Burton said.

Roese has 20 granted and pending patents to his credit. Prior to this, he was serving as senior vice president and general manager of Huawei’s North American R&D organization.

"The entire IT industry is in a period of rapid evolution towards radically more agile, scalable and user-centric computing.  EMC is ideally positioned in the centre of this transformation with core strengths across cloud, big data, and trusted IT. I am excited and energized to join this great company at the beginning of this next exciting chapter for the global technology industry,” John Roese said.

Roese will be replacing Jeff Nick, who was serving for the past eight years. Nick will take over a new CTO role reporting to Paul Maritz, EMC’s Chief Strategist, focused on big data and emerging applications initiatives. 

Prior to Huawei, Roece was CTO of Nortel, and senior technology and R&D executive globally for the corporation, with functional responsibility for an R&D staff of 12,000 and an annual budget of $1.7 billion. And, prior to that, he was CTO at Broadcom Corporation and CTO, chief marketing officer and chief information security officer of Enterasys Networks.