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Michael Dell has just named the group of executives who will run the combined Dell-EMC-VMware empire he’ll be heading up once he closes on his $67 billion acquisition later this year.
There aren’t many surprises in the internal memo obtained by Re/code from Dell to the company’s employees worldwide, but there are a few. (A press release filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announcing the changes is expected later this afternoon. Update 11:45 AM PST: Here it is!) For one thing, Jeremy Burton, currently EMC’s president for products and marketing, has been named chief marketing officer of the combined company and will be responsible for brand, marketing and communications. He’s taking that title from Karen Quintos, currently Dell’s CMO, who’s now going to be chief customer officer.
Burton’s promotion to CMO was one of several of what are described in Dell’s internal management nomenclature as L2s, or level-2 executives. Sources familiar with Dell’s operations described a process re-organizing the management structure of the combined Dell-EMC that is still unfolding. For example the next round of appointments — the L3s reporting up to all these L2s — may not be named until much later this year, or maybe even early in 2017.
Jeff Clarke, currently president and vice-chairman of Dell and head of its personal computing operations, is more or less holding on to that role. His new title is vice chairman and president for operations and client solutions. (A client, in Dell-speak, is usually a PC.) He’ll also be in charge of the company’s combined global supply chain and end-user experience.
EMC’s David Goulden, currently CEO of the information infrastructure division, its largest business unit, was named president of the Enterprise Systems Group, taking charge of servers, storage, networking converged infrastructure and solutions. Marius Haas, currently Dell’s chief commercial officer, running its server, storage and networking operation, is retaining his titles — but his role will, insiders tell me, be aimed at selling to mid-market customers. The memo describes Haas as being “responsible for our global go-to-market organization serving Commercial customers.”
Reporting up to Goulden will be Bill Scannell, president of enterprise sales, who will run the go-to-market operation for larger enterprise customers with 1,000 employees or more.
In the memo Dell says Haas, Scannell and Clarke will be “working together over the next few months to determine which accounts and people align to each go-to-market organization.” Hint to enterprise-facing employees at Dell and EMC employees: Your next boss may be a little unclear for awhile.
Dell also named a new “executive group” consisting of the heads of the various companies that will form the new Dell-EMC federation. They include VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger; Mike Cote, President and CEO of SecureWorks, the Dell-owned security outfit that’s due for an IPO soon; Rob Mee, the CEO of the EMC-owned big data software outfit Pivotal; and Rodney Rogers CEO of EMC-owned cloud services company Virtustream. Rogers will also report up to Goulden, as will Amit Yoran, CEO of RSA, the security company; and Rohit Ghai, president of the enterprise content division.
The new organization structure will be effective immediately after the transaction closes, Dell writes in the memo. The deal is expected to close in the fall and the timing I hear most often is sometime during the month of October.
Dell has proposed to pay as much as $67 billion for EMC including its controlling stake in VMware. The deal has just received regulatory approvals from the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. an antitrust regulators in the European Union, though EMC shareholders have yet to approve. “The transaction remains on schedule under the original timetable and the original terms,” Dell wrote.
A Dell spokesman had no comment on the memo. A spokeswoman for EMC didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Also named in the memo: Rich Rothberg, general counsel, and Tom Sweet, chief financial officer. Rory Read, the former CEO of chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices who joined Dell a year ago, continues to head up the integration team with EMC’s Howard Elias.
John Swainson, president of Dell Software, and Suresh Vaswani, president of Dell Services, both retained their current titles. Both of those units are said to be for sale, so stay tuned for more developments on that front.
Today’s moves by Dell come alongside other moves at VMware also announced today: COO Carl Eschenbach is leaving to join Sequoia Capital.
Updated with several links to prior stories plus LinkedIn profiles of some of the people mentioned, and a clarification concerning the timing during which the acquisition is expected to close. Also the formal announcement will come in an SEC filing, not a press release as we originally reported. We also added a paragraph on the status of the ongoing changes to the organizational structure.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
