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Ex X-IO exec Alan Atkinson takes reins at Dell's Compellent

Just suddenly appears behind desk one day

X-IO's chairman and ex-CEO Alan Atkinson has joined Dell to run its Compellent operation.

There has been no announcement by Dell , or X-IO, but Atkinson's LinkedIn entry shows the move has been made.

When Dell bought Compellent its co-founder and CEO Phil Soran stayed on and ran Compellent as a Dell business until he left in January 2012. That left Darren Thomas, Dell's VP and general manager for storage, holding the Compellent reins which Atkinson has picked up.

X-IO sells Integrated Storage Elements or ISE boxes which are sealed canisters of disk drives offering high-performance and a 5-year warranty. They lack storage array controller functions but are far, far more capable than JBOD boxes. This meant that they didn't fit into existing storage selling patterns and X-IO, then Xiotech, had a hard job making progress.

Atkinson came into Xiotech to help grow the business in October 2009. Two years later the X-IO name came along in a re-branding exercise, in August 2011. In November that year Atkinson became chairman with John Beletic brought in as CEO. Five months later he jumped ship and joined Dell.

It's quite a career progression, from CEO to chairman, and then to VP and general manager. A possibility is that the investors behind X-IO cracked their whip and brought Beletic in, giving Atkinson a period of grace in which to find another post. ®

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