EMC's chief executive officer Joe Tucci was rewarded handsomely last year with a gutsy salary and piles of options even though the company lost ground to the competition.

Diamond Joe was awarded a US$675,000 bonus on top of his million dollar salary, according to a Friday SEC filing. The EMC chief also received 2 million shares in stock options for his storage savvy.

Chairman Mike Ruettgers fared almost as well with one million in salary and $650,00 in bonus but only half the options. Ruettgers' salary has fallen since the 2000 and 2001 boom years, while Tucci has received fairly equal packages all three years.

Toni Sacconaghi, a rare reservoir of sanity in the financial analyst community, shows EMC losing a whopping 10 percent of market share in the second half of 2002 as compared to the first half. His recent Sanford C. Bernstein & Co report notes that IBM wooed most of these defectors, and Hitachi also made gains. Hitachi has piggy-backed on HP and Sun, who resell its high end systems, and tied with EMC atop the high end storage market, with both companies taking 39 percent share.

Still, Diamond Joe is a charming fellow with a rich New York accent and charisma to match. CIOs must be a callous breed to deny this man a storage sale.

In the long run, technology buyers may warm to EMC again. Tucci has spearheaded the company's push to round out its software arsenal and ship code wherever it can. By all accounts, EMC appears to have some of the best management products around for multivendor data centers.

This code could be the key to EMC's defense against IBM and Hitachi and boost revenue once again. At least, that's what Tucci is banking on. ®