EMC: Jeffrey M. Nick, Senior VP and Chief Technology Officer

EMC is about information storage, management, protection, and analysis.

In 2007, for the first time, storage space exceeded what was available to us, according to an IDC white paper sponsored by EMC titled The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe, which projected that by 2011, the digital universe would be 10 times the size it was in 2006 with almost half of this information not having a permanent home.

We humans are evolving into a bunch of digital packrats. We store our images, video clips, TV shows, songs, voice packets, financial records, documents, sensor signals, e-mail, text messages, RFID tags, and more and expect someone to manage all this stuff for us.

It's enough to keep someone like Jeff Nick awake at night.