Richard Belluzzo
Quick Facts
Biography
Richard Belluzzo (often known as Rick Belluzzo) (born November 26, 1953) is an American businessman who worked as an executive at Hewlett-Packard (HP), Silicon Graphics (SGI), and Microsoft before becoming CEO of Quantum Corp. in September 2002. He held this position until April 2011, when he became the executive chairman until August 2012. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting from Golden Gate University.
Belluzzo worked for HP for 23 years, with his last role being executive vice president of their computer division. He moved to SGI in January 1998, becoming Chairman of the Board and CEO, succeeding Edward R. McCracken. In August 1999, Belluzzo left SGI to head Microsoft's MSN division. He became president and chief operating officer of Microsoft for fourteen months, but left in Spring 2002, moving to Quantum in September the same year.
Much of his career is clouded in controversy and many consider him to be responsible for the demise of SGI.
He was a strong advocate at HP to reduce their investments in HP-UX and PA-RISC in favor of Windows NT and Itanium, as well as getting SGI to cut their investments in IRIX and MIPS. The effect of these decisions was to destroy two of the leading platforms in Unix computing and greatly increased the opportunity for Intel and Microsoft to get into high-end computing.