THE INTERVIEW
Welcome to
the Data Era
26
John Roese, president and chief
technology officer at Dell Technologies,
in conversation with Realize,
shares his outlook on the state of data
and the technologies that make sense of it.
What was the path that led to your role
as CTO at Dell Technologies?
It’s a long one! The punchline is I’m a serial
CTO, but I’m a CTO that has crossed many different
industries. I’ve been in telecom, enterprise
networking, compute, security, cellular,
unified communications, real-time communications,
storage, and everything else.
It was 2012 when I got a call from EMC. I
wasn’t actually looking for a job, but I had a
feeling that EMC was going to end up right
in the middle of something very disruptive. I
didn’t know exactly what it was going to be,
but it seemed like with VMware, Pivotal, and
EMC, we were going to be in the middle of the
BY ANNA-LEE MUCK
action. For me, that’s the most exciting thing
about the industry. Then when we announced
we were going to combine with Dell, it seemed
even more like being in the center of the
technology universe. I led the overarching
technology strategy to integrate Dell and EMC
(and build Dell Technologies), then became
the CTO.
Funny enough, when heading to college, I
flipped a coin between being a lawyer and an
electrical engineer. I sometimes say I lost and
picked the engineering path, but of course I
don’t really think that.
What are you most passionate
about as CTO?
As a technologist, probably the most important
thing in your life is when you see the ideas
and technologies that you saw first or that you
created actually go into practice and change
the human condition in a positive way.
PHOTO BY BOB O’CONNOR