EMC suing salespeople who defected to rival

Alleging a conspiracy by a rival in Silicon Valley, Hopkinton-based EMC has unleashed a barrage of lawsuits against former salespeople it says left with proprietary EMC information.

In the latest suit, filed yesterday in US District Court in Boston, EMC charges that Chadwick Johnson, a former salesman in Texas, took with him, among other things, a spreadsheet with 93,000 entries of "names, purchase histories, deal values, and other highly specific, confidential, and critical information about EMC customers" when he went to work for Pure Storage of Mountain View, CA.

The company says Johnson put the documents on two external storage devices just a day or two before he quit EMC last month - and that he accessed a third-party storage site to which he'd been syncing EMC documents several days after his departure.

Johnson's unlawful conduct is part of a larger campaign by Pure Storage and numerous former EMC employees now employed by Pure Storage, to compete unfairly with EMC by, among other things, misappropriating EMC's Confidential Information and Property, unlawfully soliciting EMC's customers and raiding EMC of its valuable employees, all in an effort to increase Pure Storage's presence in the marketplace at the expense of EMC. Since last year, not fewer than 30 high-performing employees have departed EMC under suspicious circumstances to join Pure Storage.