Mr. Moshe Yanai

An Israeli electrical engineer, he is an inventor, businessman, entrepreneur, aviator (pilot), investor, and philanthropist. He is considered to be one of the most influential contributors in the history of the data storage industry. He was named an IBM Fellow in 2008. This is the highest honor a scientist, engineer, or programmer at IBM can achieve. In the 1990s he led the development of the EMC Symmetrix, the flagship product of EMC Corporation. He was born in Israel, and earned a B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1975 from Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. He began his career building IBM-compatible mainframe data storage based on minicomputer disks for Elbit Systems (a joint project with Nixdorf Computer). Elbit Systems is an Israel-based international defense Electronics Company engaged in a wide range of programs throughout the world. He went on to develop high-end storage systems for Nixdorf in the United States. He joined EMC Corporation (EMC) in 1987, and managed the Symmetrix development, software and hardware, from its inception in the late 1980s until shortly before leaving EMC in 2001. His development team grew from several people, recruited among his former Israeli colleagues, to thousands, while he was holding the position of Vice President of EMC's Symmetrix group. The Symmetrix is the main reason for the rapid growth of EMC in the 1990s, both in size and value, from a company with a fading business of (minicomputer) computer memory boards, valued in the low hundreds of millions of dollars, to a tens of billions company. Before leaving he became an EMC Fellow in 2001. He funded and led an Israeli storage startup company, XIV Ltd., where he led the development of the first truly scalable grid storage system. XIV Ltd. was bought by IBM in January 2008 (IBM paid an estimated $300 million for a company invested in with an estimated $3 million). He continued leading XIV and became an IBM Fellow. IBM XIV Storage System became an IBM storage product. Shortly later, in April 2008, IBM bought Diligent Technologies, another storage company which he had co-founded. He left IBM in 2010 amid disagreement with IBM on the ways to advance the XIV product. He was awarded the IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award in 2010; and in June 2011 his Alma mater awarded him the honor Distinguished Fellow of the Technion. He has been a Board of Directors member of several companies.