"John brings to EMC a unique blend of experience spanning the entire breadth of IT systems from silicon all the way up through networking, storage, servers and virtualisation," said Jeremy Burton, executive vice president of product operations and marketing.

"In addition, he's directed product development in enterprise, carrier and consumer markets.

"At heart, John is a true technologist, but he is also a proven strategist and general manager with extraordinary vision and operational expertise within very large, complex organisations."

Mr Roese was most recently senior vice president and general manager of Huawei's North American R&D organisation, and also served as the executive leader of Huawei's Enterprise Global Competency Center.

He was previously CTO of Nortel; CTO of Broadcom; and CTO, chief marketing officer and chief information security officer of Enterasys Networks. He started his career at Cabletron Systems where he rose to the position of global CTO.

Mr Roese has 20 granted and pending patents.

His predecessor, Jeff Nick, has taken on a new CTO role reporting to EMC chief strategist Paul Maritz, with a focus on Big Data and emerging applications initiatives.