EMC Taps Chad Sakac as New President of $2 Billion VCE Unit

Storage giant EMC named a veteran from its executive ranks as the new president of VCE, its business unit that sells data center hardware that combines computing, storage and networking into a single product.

Chad Sakac, who for the last three years has run EMC’s Global Systems Engineering operations, will run VCE effective immediately, reporting to David Goulden, CEO of EMC’s information infrastructure business and de facto number two to CEO Joe Tucci.

EMC also renamed the unit: It will now be called the EMC Converged Platforms Division. Launched in 2009, VCE had been a joint venture between EMC, its software subsidiary VMware and the networking giant Cisco Systems. EMC, which owned the bigger stake, bought out Cisco in 2014 and made VCE a full member of its complicated federation structure.

The appointment takes place against the backdrop of EMC’s proposal to sell itself to computing company Dell in a complex transaction that’s expected to close later this year. Goulden is expected to inherit the enterprise-facing portion of the combined Dell-EMC business after the deal closes and is getting his management team in place for when that happens.

VCE’s main stock in trade is known by the unsexy name “converged infrastructure,” and it accounted for more than $2 billion in revenue in 2014 with a loss of $357 million. Its product combines the computing horsepower of a server with the data storage capability of a storage-area network along with necessary networking equipment all in a single, easy-to-buy package. Cisco no longer is a co-owner but is still an important partner, contributing the networking portion to numerous VCE products.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.