By Kyle Alspach
The chances that EMC CEO Joe Tucci will be considered for the top job at HP: pretty good.
The chances he would actually end up in the job: pretty slim.
I spoke with two local analysts this morning about the likelihood that Tucci would leave EMC, the Hopkinton-based IT giant he’s run since 2001, for the even larger behemoth that is HP.
The sudden resignation of HP CEO Mark Hurd on Friday has led to plenty of speculation about a successor. Tucci’s name popped up as a possible candidate in today’s Wall Street Journal, and one of the analysts I spoke with agreed that HP will probably at least consider him.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if they at least knocked on the door of every IT executive that’s run over a $10 billion business,” said Brian Babineau, senior consulting analyst for Milford-based Enterprise Strategy Group.
But that doesn’t mean Tucci is a logical candidate. For starters, Tucci is in his 60s and considered retirement last year, according to a May Financial Times article. Instead, he said he would put off retirement until 2012 and signed a contract extension.
“I would be surprised if he would be looking for another role,” said Matt Bryson, an analyst at Avian Securities LLC in Boston. “If it was five years ago, I think it would be a more likely possibility.”
There’s also the obvious size difference of the two companies – EMC expects $16 billion to $17 billion in revenue this year, while HP is above $100 billion, Babineau noted. And HP is split between the consumer and enterprise sides of the business, while EMC mostly does enterprise, he said.
There’s also another clue suggesting Tucci has had no intentions of leaving – no definitive successor has emerged for his job, Bryson said.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last September, Tucci said three possible successors are Pat Gelsinger, president and COO of EMC Information Infrastructure Products; Howard Elias, president and COO of EMC Information Infrastructure and Cloud Services; and David Goulden, executive vice president and CFO. But Tucci stressed that there’s no guarantee it will be one of those three.
Taking all those factors together, HP – which snatched up EMC storage division president Dave Donatelli last year – seems unlikely to do the same with Tucci.
“I think it’s a long long shot – i.e., David Ortiz hitting an inside-the-park homerun – of Joe Tucci leaving EMC for HP at this point,” Babineau said.
The death of Richard Egan this past week has taken another driving force out of the Massachusetts innovation economy. And as a force is clearly the way that his colleague Christopher Anderson remembers him — a blunt, direct force that, when applied to both business and public policy, got things done.
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