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Dell storage boss Topgun Thomas leaves 'to pursue a new opportunity'

Former fighter pilot hits the eject button

Darren Thomas, head of Dell's Storage Group, is leaving the company, following several quarters of declining revenue and an influx of new executive blood into Dell.

Dell spokesperson Gladtys Elia said: "Darren Thomas has decided to pursue a new opportunity outside of Dell. … Alan Atkinson, vice president and general manager of Compellent, and Pete Korce, vice president and general manager, EqualLogic and NAS Storage Solutions, are leading Dell’s storage business at this time."

Looks like a competition between the recent hire Alan Atkinson and Korce.

Darren Thomas in Top Gun jacket

Darren Thomas has spent nine years running Dell storage and overseen the strategy of buying suppliers like EqualLogic (iSCSI SAN), Compellent (Fibre Channel SAN), Ocarina (data compression) and Exanet (scale-out NAS) to build the present storage products group and generate revenues to replace those lost when Dell ended its EMC storage reselling relationship. However the storage product group revenues have been declining for two years with no signs of an upturn.

Dell Storage Revenue History

At the same time there is a move to more integrated systems with storage, networking and server hardware integrated with system software in Dell's ActiveSystems.

Recently Dell hired Marius Haas to be its President for Enterprise Solutions and Thomas reported to him, as did new hire Dario Zamorian who was the VP and general manager for Enterprise Systems and Solutions, the converged and integrated systems. Tom Bourne runs Dell networking in Haas' organisation and Forrest Norrod is responsible for servers. Jai Menon is Haas' chief technical officer and a prestigious hire from IBM.

Dell also hired John Swainson to be the president of its software group and a wave of software acquisitions, such as Quest and Kace, have filled his product roster. And it has appointed a new head for the services division, Suresh Vaswani from Dell's application and business process outsourcing area, replacing Steve Schuckenbrock.

We hear that Dell is thinking of creating an enterprise software group with some storage software moving to it.

There are bound to be more changes as Haas has his way with the organisation. We expect Zamorian and Atkinson to have their roles strengthened. ®

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