EMC has named John Roese, nicked from Huawei, as CTO.

He replaces Jeff Nick, who has moved over in a similar capacity working with chief strategist Paul Maritz, the former CEO of VMware, who's got a mystery job at VMware's parent company EMC. Maritz is said to be focused on Big Data and emerging applications initiatives.

Roese was general manager of Huawei's North American R&D organization and the executive leader of its Enterprise Global Competency Center, which provides enterprise technology innovation and incubation as well as sales, marketing and operations support for Huawei's enterprise field sales and marketing teams worldwide.

Before Huawei, he was CTO of Nortel, with functional responsibility for an R&D staff of 12,000 and an annual budget of $1.7 billion.

Prior to Nortel, he was a CTO at Broadcom and the CTO, CMO and chief information security officer of Enterasys Networks. He started at Cabletron.

Expected to play a key role in shaping the next phase of EMC's technology strategy across the cloud, Big Data and trusted IT, Roese will report to EVP of product operations and marketing Jeremy Burton.

Burton said, "John brings to EMC a unique blend of experience spanning the entire breadth of IT systems from silicon all the way up through networking, storage, servers and virtualization. In addition, he's directed product development in enterprise, carrier and consumer markets. At heart, John is a true technologist, but he is also a proven strategist and general manager with extraordinary vision and operational expertise within very large, complex organizations."