Moshe Yanai has left IBM

Pursuing other interests

Moshe Yanai, the founder of EMC's Symmetrix product, storage company XIV and co-founder of Diligent, has left IBM.

An IBM spokeswoman said: "Moshe Yanai left IBM to pursue other interests. IBM appreciates Moshe's contributions to the company. XIV is an important part of IBM's storage portfolio. In fact, XIV added more than 130 new customers to the platform in the second quarter, and revenue more than doubled year to year."

Rumours of his departure have been spreading for a couple of months, the latest yesterday when, in a surprisingly aggressive attack on Yanai by an HDS executive in a blog entry, he accused Yanai of being egotistical, greedy and arrogant.

Yanai is listed as being a board advisor for Axxana, a startup producing Phoenix, a fire and bomb proof disaster recovery product. He recently donated $10m to fund annual prizes for professors at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, saying he had had an unrewarding time there. To win the Yanai prize professors will have to provide good student teaching experiences.

That might seem ironic to people who worked alongside Yanai in EMC and had their own unrewarding experiences. ®