After $67 Billion Deal, Dell and EMC Tap Two Executives to Lead Integration

A day after announcing plans to undertake the $67 billion takeover of EMC and the biggest tech M&A deal of all time, Michael Dell, CEO of the computing company that bears his name, has announced two execs who will be in charge of putting the companies together.

Sources familiar with the matter confirm to Re/code that Rory Read, the former CEO of chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices who landed at Dell’s enterprise division earlier this year, will lead the effort from the Dell side. Howard Elias, the COO of EMC, will represent EMC.

Dell announced the appointments at an internal town hall meeting with employees on Tuesday.

Read joined Dell in March after being pushed out of AMD by that company’s board last year. He had joined AMD as its CEO in 2011 after a long career with IBM and Lenovo.

Elias is a longtime IT industry veteran who joined the company in 2003 after working in senior roles at Hewlett-Packard and at Compaq before that.

The two executives will handle the heavy lifting around combining Dell’s assets with EMC’s as the companies work to close their massive transaction in a process that is expected to take between nine months and a year.

Sources say their brief includes a process of “portfolio rationalization,” which is code for looking for assets that might be sold off and for where jobs might be cut.

A key aspect of the integration will be centralizing Dell’s enterprise business at EMC headquarters in Hopkinton, Mass. During the meeting, though, Dell told employees of that group — known internally as Enterprise Solutions Group, or ESG — that they won’t be required to relocate. “All of you here in Austin, as part of our ESG business … we’re not asking you to move anywhere,” Dell said, according to a transcript of the meeting. The combined business will be run by David Goulden, currently the CEO of EMC’s Information Infrastructure business unit.

Update: The transcript of the town hall meeting is now public by way of an EMC filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. You can read it here.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.