Dell Storage Chief Thomas Leaves for New Opportunities

Thomas

Thomas, who came to Dell after 15 years at Compaq, will be replaced, at least in the near term, by a general manager and vice president duo, namely Compellent’s Alan Atkinson and Pete Korce from EqualLogic and NAS storage solutions, who together will head up Dell storage until a more permanent replacement is hired.

According to this report, a Dell spokesperson confirmed Thomas’ departure: “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.”

Dell stopped reselling EMC’s (NYSE: EMC) storage a little more than a year ago in favor of selling its own Compellent and EqualLogic gear as part of a converged solution, a move that undoubtedly has contributed to the vendor’s sliding storage sales in recent quarters. For Q3 2013, Dell storage sales slipped some 3 percent.

During his tenure, Thomas presided over major strategic shifts in Dell’s storage lineup, including purchases of suppliers EqualLogic, Compellent, Ocarina and Exanet, moves that expanded the vendor’s portfolio to iSCSI SAN, fibre channel SAN, data compression and scale out NAS, and set the stage for its current strategy to integrate storage with networking, servers and software solutions.

Thomas leaves Dell as the vendor continues to seek the right mix of senior management. Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services, was replaced last week after a five-year run by Suresh Vaswani, who moved over from application and business process outsourcing (BPO). Schuckenbrock joined Dell in the beginning stages of an influx of new senior management that subsequently included heavyweights such as Enterprise business head Marius Haas and Software chief John Swainson, both hired earlier this year, as the vendor began to swim in deeper IT waters.