SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had

All was going well with the memory game and EMC's early business until the company entered the disk-drive market. EMC purchased a large batch of defective drives and put them to work with computers crunching through crucial data. When a drive failed, it could take up to 72 hours to restore the data and bring the box back to life.

"I had more than one data center manager break down and cry because they were going to lose their job over a decision to buy our stuff," Ruettgers said.

My, what a difference a decade can make.

By focusing on providing storage for IBM's mainframes, EMC carved out a huge niche in a lucrative market. It then went after Unix vendors early and set aggressive sales targets for staff. (When they missed sales goals, workers would find excess inventory clogging their offices courtesy of Ruettgers.) EMC then nurtured the data warehousing market and pushed SANs early.

Before Ruettgers knew it, EMC's success led investors to hike shares of the company higher than any other firm on the NYSE during the 1990s. EMC's stock skyrocketed 88,000 per cent over 10 years. The only stock to perform better was Nasdaq player Dell.

While a retired Ruettgers now intends to spend most of his time pushing for strong education standards and improved health care, he will also do a bit of dirty work for EMC. That's a result of Ruettgers' decision to leave EMC before a strong enough No.2 executive was ready to complement CEO and chairman, Joe Tucci.

"Up until recently, we have always had a CEO and a chairman," Ruettgers said. "In other words, it was two, separate jobs. I find it's very hard when you have the chairman and CEO as the same person."

Er, so why did you let Tucci do it?

"I put him in a bind," Ruettgers said. "Some of these arrangements are probably temporary, and I told him I would do some things for him."

Anyone interested in the EMC chairman job?

It's so easy to glorify executives of solid companies on their way out. They were magicians, visionaries and business geniuses.

Such sweeping statements do little to get at the truth. And, in reality, only EMC veterans and competitors can gauge how effective Ruettgers was as a businessman.

However, our limited interaction with the man can confirm a couple of things. For one, he comes off as a warm, disarming chap. Ruettgers always treated us with the utmost respect in interviews and took the time to answer some stupid questions.

Two, this persona isn't just a song and dance he does for the press. As it turns out, a good friend of ours is a neighbor to the Ruettgers clan. She reckons he's as much of a class act away from the EMC scene as he is in front of it. ®

Bootnote

If you have any interest in technology history whatsoever, make sure you have a dig around here.

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