Howard Elias is President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure and Cloud Services. With revenues of $17 billion in 2010 and approximately 48,500 people worldwide, EMC is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset – information – in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way.

Elias has overall responsibility for setting the strategy, driving execution, and creating best practices for EMC services that enable our customers' journey to cloud computing. He oversees EMC's consulting services, technology professional services, and award-winning global customer support organizations, which provide strategic guidance and technology expertise to help organizations drive business value through IT innovation with a focus on exceptional total customer experience. In addition, Elias leads EMC's Cloud Service Provider partner program, helping our customers and partners accelerate the adoption and benefits of cloud computing. He reports to Joe Tucci, EMC's Chairman, President and CEO.

Elias also serves on the Board of Managers of the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Company, formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel, where he applies his thought leadership and expertise to help accelerate the adoption of cloud-based computing models.

Previously, Elias was President, EMC Global Services and EMC Ionix, and an EMC Executive Vice President. He was responsible for managing the EMC Global Services team in addition to EMC Ionix, the leading provider of next-generation software and solutions that accelerate the migration from physical IT to virtual IT to cloud infrastructures and provide unparalleled insight and control across all critical IT domains in the data center.

Prior to his role managing EMC Global Services, Elias was Executive Vice President, Global Marketing and Corporate Development. In addition to overseeing all of EMC's marketing, sales enablement, communications, and technology alliances activities, he was also responsible for Corporate Development and New Ventures, which focused on M&A, new business development, and the integration of acquisitions as well as investments and the incubation of new businesses.

A veteran IT executive, Elias joined EMC in October 2003 from Hewlett-Packard Company, where he was Senior Vice President of Business Management and Operations for the Enterprise Systems Group. Previous to that, he was HP's Senior Vice President and General Manager of Network Storage Solutions. Prior to HP's acquisition of Compaq in 2002, Elias spent a year as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Compaq's Business Critical Server Group and three years as Vice President and General Manager of the company's Storage Products Division, during which Compaq became a leader in mid-tier storage systems. He also held various senior business and product management positions at Digital, AST Research, and Tandy Corporation.

Elias is a director of Gannett, one of the USA's leading media and marketing solutions companies, and serves as a Director of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME).

He attended Wayne State University and Lawrence Technological University, where he studied electrical engineering and computer science.