EMC has taken legal action against rival Pure Storage, accusing it of stealing trade secrets.
The company, which provides cloud computing, big data and trusted IT solutions, has filed a lawsuit against Pure Storage for purportedly conspiring with EMC's ex-employees and stealing confidential information and trade secrets, which include lists and information on current and probable customers.
EMC filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and alleges that "dozens of former EMC employees have joined Pure Storage and stolen tens of thousands of pages of proprietary, highly confidential and competitively sensitive EMC materials," which is a violation of their employee agreements.
Moreover, many of the former employees also supposedly induced other EMC team members to join Pure Storage.
"In numerous instances, these former employees returned misappropriated EMC materials only after EMC was compelled to initiate litigation-and in several instances only pursuant to court direction," per EMC.
The "EMC materials" allegedly include information pertaining to EMC's "directly competing" flash storage product, as well as selling strategies for the product. Information pertaining on EMC's customers and their buying patterns are also believed to have been compromised.
Per EMC's complaint, the former employee behavior was "apparently orchestrated by or known to the highest executive management levels of Pure Storage."
However, Pure Storage's CEO Scott Dietzen believes EMC's allegations have "no merit whatsoever to any of these complaints."
"Based upon our present understanding, I am wholly confident that Pure Storage and all of our employees have been behaving ethically, and that these charges will be proven to be without merit. More importantly, 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," said Scott Dietzen, CEO Pure Storage.
Dietzen has revealed it will continue defending the six employees EMC as already sued, as well as the current lawsuit.
EMC has not only sued Pure Storage for damages, but has also asked the court to order the latter to return confidential information which belongs to the former.
