David Goulden, who was widely considered a top candidate to succeed EMC boss Joe Tucci before he pushed back his retirement to 2015, has finally been named CEO of the storage giant’s core information infrastructure. He previously served as the company’s president and chief operating officer.

Goulden has been with EMC for 11 years, directing marketing efforts in the early 2000’s and later leading business development. The executive oversaw the acquisition of Documentum, data protection vendor Legato Systems (now NetWorker) and most notably, VMware. The virtualization giant is currently headed by Pat Gelsinger, who took the helm after former CEO Paul Maritz stepped down to assume the top post at Pivotal. Pegged as the “third member of the EMC federation,” the cloud firm was established last year with $105 million in funding from GE.

“This is absolutely not a shocker – it’s purely a formality. Goulden has been running ‘EMC Classic’ for well over a year and has been positioned as a peer to Gelsinger and Maritz since the announcement of the EMC Federation of companies,” says Dave Vellante, co-founder and chief analyst at Wikibon. “The timing makes sense to do this at the beginning of the year and it makes EMC’s org chart a bit cleaner. That’s it.”

In a 2013 interview on theCUBE with Vellante and SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier, Goulden gave us a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the EMC juggernaut (full video below). Customer feedback plays a central role in decision making, he said, and the organizational structure of the company provides each division with sufficient freedom to innovate independently while maintaining a sharp focus on the big picture.

“EMC is a technology company; the innovation around the governance and the business model was just a way to foster that innovation around the technology,” Goulden explained. This approach keeps EMC greater than the sum of its parts.

image source EMC