Partners Welcome Appointment Of EMC Veteran As VCE President

EMC executive Frank Hauck on Wednesday was introduced to the employees of VCE as the company's new president in a document circulated in the company, a copy of which was reviewed by CRN. Until the appointment, Hauck was an EMC executive vice president and a member of the EMC executive office of the Chairman.

Hauck, a 20-year EMC veteran, will report to Michael Capellas, chairman and CEO of VCE, and will focus on such areas as customer service, new product delivery, and adoption of new technologies.

EMC, Cisco, and VMware in November of 2009 unveiled VCE and Vblock Infrastructure Packages, a series of pre-configured, pre-tested storage solutions based on EMC’s Symmetrix or Clariion storage arrays, Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) and networking switches, and VMware's vSphere server and cloud virtualization platform.

VCE was officially founded in November of 2009 with 80 employees, but now numbers about 800 employees worldwide.

Reaction from VCE's channel partners has been positive as they expect Hauck to help the company grow.

Jamie Shepard, executive vice president of technology solutions at ICI, a Marlborough, Mass.-based solution provider and VCE partner, said Hauck is perfect for the job.

"VCE is a data center play," Shepard said. "Having a data center person like Frank is the right thing for the company."

Hauck has played a strategic role at EMC for years, Shepard said. "He did it all," he said. "He's a stud in the industry, he's very approachable, and he runs a very tight ship."

Bob Olwig, vice president of business strategy at World Wide Technology, a St. Louis-based solution provider and VCE partner, congratulated VCE on the appointment.

"Overall, it’s another highly visible and significant investment that EMC and Cisco are making in the partnership," Olwig said. "Frank will be joining a number of other industry veterans at VCE."

Hauck is the right person to help take VCE into the future as the company grows out of its startup stage, said Raphael Meyerowitz, asst. vice president of data center technical services at Presidio Networked Solutions, a Greenbelt, Md.-based solution provider and VCE partner.

"It's a good move," Meyerowitz said. "They need someone on the operations side to get operations issues out of the way. Not that there are any real issues. But it's a new company that was just launched last year."

The appointment shows that VCE is definitely willing to invest in the future, Meyerowitz said. "Capellas needs someone like that to help him," he said.