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EMC suing salespeople who defected to rival

EMC

Alleging a conspiracy by a rival in Silicon Valley, Hopkinton-based EMC has unleashed a barrage of lawsuits against former salespeople it says left with proprietary EMC information.

In the latest suit, filed yesterday in US District Court in Boston, EMC charges that Chadwick Johnson, a former salesman in Texas, took with him, among other things, a spreadsheet with 93,000 entries of "names, purchase histories, deal values, and other highly specific, confidential, and critical information about EMC customers" when he went to work for Pure Storage of Mountain View, CA.

The company says Johnson put the documents on two external storage devices just a day or two before he quit EMC last month - and that he accessed a third-party storage site to which he'd been syncing EMC documents several days after his departure.

Johnson's unlawful conduct is part of a larger campaign by Pure Storage and numerous former EMC employees now employed by Pure Storage, to compete unfairly with EMC by, among other things, misappropriating EMC's Confidential Information and Property, unlawfully soliciting EMC's customers and raiding EMC of its valuable employees, all in an effort to increase Pure Storage's presence in the marketplace at the expense of EMC. Since last year, not fewer than 30 high-performing employees have departed EMC under suspicious circumstances to join Pure Storage.

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PDF icon EMC complaint against Johnson298.17 KB


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Comments

Why bring up the case of employees leaving though? If a company treats its employees fairly, and doesn't alienate them, then they will be happy and stay. If an employee wants to work elsewhere, then that's their own business.

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They can absolutely go elsewhere, but they can't steal stuff on the way out. In this case, stuff is company information.

I don't know the details of these two companies at all, but one possible scenario is new company pays sales person substantial "signing bonus" for bringing along sensitive info from old company. New company doesn't really care about employee, that data is worth the cost.

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If a company treats its employees fairly, and doesn't alienate them, then they will be happy and stay.

That statement simply doesn't apply to the high-powered, very successful salesperson in an extremely competitive market. Their only motivation is $$$$, and they make a ton of it.

Coincidentally, EMC reported its earnings today and slightly missed revenue and income targets.

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Almost. Try "EMC is suing people who stole company information and property."

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most tech companies have you sign non-competes specifically for this reason. Sales people are almost always eligible for suit if they decide to make it apparent they went to work for a competing company

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