In what one might describe as attempts at staunching brain drain EMC sues a former salesman with accusations of taking sensitive information to his new employer, rival storage vendor Pure Storage.
According to the suit, among the documents taken by ex-employee Chadwick Johnson is a spreadsheet containing 93000 entries of "names, purchase histories, deal values, and other highly specific, confidential, and critical information about EMC customers." Further files include an "EMC Competitive Selling Guide” explaining “EMC’s strategy for selling its XtremIO flash storage product against Pure Storage’s FA Series products,” a document detailing customer-partner relationships, and another detailing “extensive data and analysis regarding EMC’s strategy for leveraging customer and partner relationships.”
Allegedly Johnson saved the documents on "two separate external storage devices" a couple of days before he left for Pure Storage on September 2013. He also made use of a 3rd party storage site to sync EMC documents several days following his departure.
EMC does not think this is just a case of a single bad egg-- on the contrary, in a conspiracy conducted by Pure storage and numerous ex-EMC employees in order to "compete unfairly with EMC." The suit reveals 30 "high-performing" employees left for Pure Storage, departures EMC describes as "raiding."
Litigation with ex-employees is something EMC has a bit of a reputation for. Back in 2009 it sued former exec Dave Donatelli, who had left for HP. The result was Donatelli not working on HP storage products for at least a year.
