Former Nortel Networks chief technology officer John Roese has made his second corporate move in two years.
Roese, who was senior vice-president and general manager of Huawei Technologies’ North American research and development organization, has become CTO at EMC Corp.
The announcement was made Tuesday.
“The entire IT industry is in a period of rapid evolution towards radically more agile, scalable and user-centric computing,” Roese said in a statement. “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.”
He will report to executive VP of product operations and marketing Jeremy Burton.
In a statement Burton said Roese, who has worked as CTO at Broadcom Corp. and Enterasys Networks, has 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’s 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. I am thrilled to welcome John to EMC.”
EMC is focused on storage, while its remains one of the largest shareholders in virtualization specialist VMware.
Huawei is a growing China-based carrier and enterprise network equipment manufacturer. However, its alleged ties to the Chinese government has led some governments around the world to question whether its equipment (and that of ZTE) should be allowed on government networks.
In April the Australian government refused to allow Huawei to bid on equipment for its new national broadband network.
The U.S. Congress has held number hearings into whether Huawei can be a supplier to the government there. The most recent was in September when a Huawei official denied allegations the Chinese government and the military have ties to it.
Huawei sells equipment to BCE Inc.’s Bell Mobility and Telus Corp., and has a research lab in Ottawa.