Is the treasurer's job challenging? Just ask Irina Simmons: the executive vice president and EMC Corp. talks about the evolution of the company and her career advancement--which has been closely tied to the company's success.

• Author: Heffes, Ellen M.
• Position: Treasury

"It's funny," says Irina Simmons, "people always give treasurers credit for growing cash, but the reality is that it's the business that generates cash." Simmons is executive vice president and treasurer of EMC Corp., the giant Hopkinton, Mass.-based company known as a world leader in products, services and solutions for information storage and management.

With 2003 revenues of $6.2 billion and 21,000 employees in more than 50 countries worldwide, EMC has changed significantly since it opened its doors in August 1979, 25 years ago.

Simmons majored in economics at Tufts University and started her career with Millipore Corp., a high-tech company that generally hired MBAs for her position. Nothing clicked at first, as she moved from role to role--from budgeting to IT to accounting--until a job opened up in treasury, where "all the light bulbs went off." She liked the strategy involved in moving money around.

A member of FEI's Boston Chapter, Simmons shares insights with Financial Executive's Managing Editor, Ellen M. Heffes, about the company, the business and herself, personally, as a senior finance executive in a changing and challenging role.

YOU JOINED EMC IN 1994 AS ASSISTANT TREASURER, WERE MADE TREASURER IN 2000 AND ADDED SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT IN 2003. TALK ABOUT YOUR ROLE.

SIMMONS: When I joined EMC, the challenge was to take what was there in terms of the treasury function and expand on it and try to match it up with the rapid growth of the company. Traditionally, many treasurers grow up in their role and gain experience through managing debt for their companies.

This was a bit different in that, from the very beginning, EMC has been a company that has not had any significant amounts of debt--it's been a cash-rich company. We've [accumulated] some debt in our history, but not significant [amounts].

For me, the challenge was managing our liquidity as an asset. That drove me to get very close to the different functional groups in the company, to try to understand how we can use our cash position to help the business. I've tried to make the treasury organization a business partner. And that is not always easy, because it's not always obvious. People in sales don't necessarily wake up and say, "Gee, I'll call Treasury and see what they can do for me today."

It was a process of really understanding the business and trying to learn about the business, so that I could then find ways to take our strong position and help. That was was my role, and as the company has evolved and changed, the challenge was to evolve that [function] as well.

In terms of the scope of my job, it's followed EMC's track record. EMC was just under $2 billion when I joined; it's grown very rapidly--and my role has grown, as the company has grown. My career advancement has been very closely tied to years of success of the company.

EMC JUST CELEBRATED ITS 25TH ANNIVERSARY. TALK ABOUT THE BUSINESS, HOW IT'S CHANGED, AND, GENERALLY, HOW YOU--IN YOUR TREASURER ROLE--ARE INVOLVED IN STRATEGY.

SIMMONS: Twenty-five years is a big milestone for a tech company, in general, but having been here for 10 of those, I've seen it go through a lot and change a lot. My first four or five years were very exciting--we were growing so fast, there was not time to sit down and contemplate a lot.

Obviously, hitting the rough patch in the 2000-2001 timeframe was a very hard blow. I had worked in a number of New England-based tech companies in the late 1980s-early '90s where similar things have happened, [but] we [at EMC] were on such a ride that when we hit that...