Xiotech Raids EMC for New President/CEO

Xiotech, one of the more innovative midsize data storage companies, has a new president and CEO as of Oct. 1. He is Alan Atkinson, who moves over from EMC to succeed Casey Powell, who served four years as the company’s CEO. Powell will remain with Xiotech as a member of its board of directors, the company said.

Atkinson, a 21-year veteran storage executive, was vice president of the Storage Software Group at EMC. Prior to that position, he was co-founder and CEO of WysDM Software, a company he sold to EMC in 2008. In previous lives, Atkinson also served at StorageNetworks, Goldman Sachs, and AT&T Bell Laboratories.

The fact that Powell is stepping aside is no reflection on the job he did for Xiotech. The company improved its market standing under Powell’s leadership and acquired and successfully launched its patented Intelligent Storage Element product line.

“Alan is a great addition to an already great Xiotech team,” Steve Duplessie, Enterprise Storage Group founder and senior analyst said. “He has fantastic real-life experience on each side of the landscape — as someone who bought and managed global storage environments, and as a vendor building products and companies for those environments. I think he can bring some fresh perspective to the Xiotech lineup.”

Xiotech, based in Eden Prairie, Minn., provides data storage and data protection products and services to midsize organizations. It makes the Magnitude line of midrange storage solutions that includes Fibre Channel and iSCSI-based SAN (storage area network) systems and a comprehensive set of data protection solutions.