EMC has poached Pat Gelsinger, the head of Intel’s enterprise chip business, and made him president and COO of its storage products. It’s also promoted Howard Elias to president and COO of storage and cloud services, touching off a two-man race to succeed incumbent CEO Joe Tucci.

Gelsinger has CEO-itis, an itch that wasn’t going to get scratched at Intel.

No apotheosis is imminent at EMC either. Tucci has told his board he plans to remain chairman and CEO through 2012.

With Gelsinger’s departure Intel has announced a massive reorganization, said to have been in the works for some time and isolating in turn three possible candidates, all in their 50s, to eventually succeed Intel CEO Paul Otellini.

The reorg cuts the number of Otellini’s direct reports from 12 or so to eight and is supposed to give him more time to spend on corporate strategy and the company’s growth initiatives.

Anyway, Intel is consolidating all of its major product divisions into a new Intel Architecture Group (IAG) that will be co-managed by Sean Maloney and Dadi Perlmutter. Maloney will be responsible for business and operations while Perlmutter leads product development and architecture.

All of Intel’s components businesses based on the Intel architecture, as well as all the development and marketing teams needed to bring these products to market, will report to them.

Meanwhile, Intel’s global manufacturing organization, the Technology and Manufacturing Group (TMG), will now report to former CFO Andy Bryant, lately Intel’s chief administrative officer.

Intel said the move “formalizes the role of influence Bryant already plays with TMG and further increases Otellini’s time on business strategy.”

Maloney is believed to be Otellini’s heir presumptive, but Perlmutter is also said to be in the running and if Otellini were run over by a streetcar tomorrow, the job would probably go to Bryant.

With Maloney’s move to IAG, Tom Kilroy will take over Intel’s Sales and Marketing Group (SMG). He previously co-managed processors for enterprise-class applications, the unit previously known as the Digital Enterprise Group (DEG) that he and Gelsinger ran. Kilroy will report to Otellini.

DEG was Intel’s largest business unit, accounting for more than half of Intel’s annual revenue. It handled Intel’s enterprise products including PC, server (Xeon and Itanium), embedded, communications, visualization and storage products as well as Nehalem microarchitecture product development.

Besides micro-architecture planning, microprocessor and chipset development, SOC (system on a chip) solutions and wireless teams there will be six business groups operating under the new IAG umbrella.

They include the PC Client Group, to be run by Mooly Eden, where Intel’s existing mobile and desktop products live; a Data Center Group, focused on servers, cloud computing, networking and HPC, to be run by Kirk Skaugen; a Visual Computing Group, focused on advanced visualization products and led by Jim Johnson; the Ultra Mobility Group, which will continue to be led by Anand Chandrasekher, that will focus on extending the Intel architecture into mobile handheld devices; the Embedded and Communications Group that Doug Davis will continue to lead; and the Digital Home Group, still under Eric Kim, that is pushing Intel chips into entertainment systems and consumer electronic applications.

Gelsinger’s arrival at EMC after 30 years at Intel resolves the dilemma created when EMC’s storage chief David Donatelli up and bolted to HP earlier this year, causing a surprised EMC to sue to get him to honor his non-compete.

Gelsinger, 48, will run RSA Information Security, content management and archiving and Ionix IT management divisions as well as EMC’s storage, addressing next-generation fully virtualized data centers, cloud computing, virtualized desktops and clients and next-generation backup and recovery solutions.

Both Gelsinger and Elias will report to Tucci and join the Executive Office of the Chairman.

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