SiliconBeat

Apparently there are some legal matters to be resolved before veteran EMC executive David Donatelli can go to work for Hewlett-Packard.

Donatelli and his former employer are suing each other over terms of a “non-compete” agreement, an EMC spokesman said today. As we noted yesterday, Donatelli resigned this week from his job as president of the storage vendor’s biggest division, and was named HP’s new executive vice president for enterprise servers, storage and networking.

HP had touted the hiring of Donatelli as part of a broader effort to knit together the company’s various hardware offerings for big data centers, “as the future of computing moves toward converged platforms.”

But HP’s storage products compete with EMC’s. And EMC has a history of working with Cisco, which is now competing with HP in selling both servers and networking gear. So one can see how this could get complicated.

A spokesman at Massachusetts-based EMC confirmed a Reuters report today that Donatelli has filed a lawsuit challenging a “non-competition” clause in his employment agreement with EMC.  These generally restrict key employees from going to work for a competitor, usually for a certain time period after leaving a company’s employment.

EMC then countersued Donatelli to enforce the agreement, according to EMC spokesman Michael Gallant. An HP spokeswoman declined to comment.

The fact that Donatelli filed first suggests he may be confident that he will prevail. And these things have a way of working themselves out.

IBM sued one of its former executives, Mark Papermaster, after he was hired by Apple last fall. But IBM later said it had resolved the dispute when Papermaster agreed to delay starting his new job for six months.