The count of former HP storage chiefs now on EMC's payroll has reached five, as EMC yesterday announced the recruitment of Howard Elias, previously Hewlett Packard Co's enterprise systems senior vice president of operations.

Elias is now executive vice president of new ventures at EMC,

where he will report to EMC CEO Joe Tucci. Before HP's merger with Compaq, he was general manager of Compaq's high-end server group, and after the merger he was general manager of HP's network storage solutions group. Elias resigned from HP over a month ago, and his duties will be shared out at the company.

Elias has followed a well-worn path. In August it emerged that Mark Sorenson, former vice president of HP's storage software division had joined EMC as its vice president of information access and recovery. In the summer of 2002 Mark Lewis left his post as HP's storage marketing vice president to become EMC's CTO and executive vice president of open software. Lewis had been the general manager of Compaq's enterprise storage division before the merger.

In January EMC hired Rainer Erlat, former head of HP's EMEA enterprise systems sales, and in March it recruited Ryan Johnson, former director of storage engineering for HP. One other HP executive is off the field at present, but could show up at EMC. Roger Archibald, HP's former NAS and infrastructure general manager resigned this summer and HP does not know of his whereabouts. From before the merger, EMC last month snagged John Koury, former vice president of worldwide storage marketing for Compaq.

Whether the exodus signals problems at the top of HP's storage organization is not clear. After the merger with Compaq, the resulting overlap in senior management made a shake-out inevitable. However the merger was completed almost 18 months ago. Executives may have been waiting for financial packages to come due before they left. EMC put the defections down to its status as as a storage-only specialist, which it said "has to be attractive." An HP spokesman retorted: "EMC is a small pond. Some people like to be big fish in a small pond - a relatively small pond."

HP was unable to say by press time whether it has a non-compete clause in its employment contracts, or whether it is considering putting one in. EMC has being do so for some while, and using it. In November 2001 it hauled Doron Kempel out of his job as CEO for virtualization start-up SanGate Systems Inc. Three months earlier, Kempel had been the head of EMC's now-defunct media solutions group, but EMC convinced a court that SanGate was exactly the kind of company that the non-compete clause barred Kempel from joining. Kempel later became CEO of a Tel Aviv-based company called Dilligent in which EMC had a large stake, and he claimed no hard feelings over EMC's action. The court that ruled in favour of EMC referred to ComputerWire copy in its judgement.