EMC has filed a lawsuit against Pure Storage for allegedly stealing the storage major’s trade secrets, such as lists and notes on current and potential customers, by hiring its former employees.
In its filing at the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, EMC claimed that several ex-EMC employees are now working with Pure Storage and had taken away thousands of pages of proprietary, top secret and competitively sensitive EMC materials ‘breaching employee agreements’.
Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen said that this is a sideshow to the real competition between Pure and EMC – delivering the next-generation of all-flash storage that is rapidly replacing incumbent mechanical disk systems of which EMC is the market leader.
"We at Pure welcome that marketplace competition," Dietzen said.
"Competition drives innovation and customer value. Competition makes our products better and makes us into a better company, more attuned to customer and partner needs.
"Competition also fuels market growth."
In its lawsuit, EMC is opposing nearly 44 of its technical engineers and sales experts, who joined Pure Storage since August 2011, and now contribute to over 50% of the startup’s sales force.
