He just couldn’t stay away. Less than three years after leaving a position as vice president and business line executive for IBM Storage, Ed Walsh is returning, this time to run the whole show. Walsh confirmed that he will become general manager of IBM’s storage division on July 1, replacing interim GM Greg Lotko, who becomes vice president of development in the division.

Described as a “whiz kid” by Wikibon Chief Analyst David Vellante, Walsh has an impressive list of successes starting and selling businesses, particularly for someone still in his 40s. Successful exits include  backup and deduplication vendor Avamar Technologies Inc. to EMC in 2006, storage virtualization startup Virtual Iron Software Inc. to Oracle in 2009 and data compression vendor Storwize Inc. to IBM in 2010. In all three of those cases, the technologies Walsh’s companies developed continue to be core parts of the acquiring companies’ product lines. Earlier, he co-founded Articulent a storage management services company that was acquired by Computer Network Technology Corp. in 2001.

Walsh lingered at IBM for three years after the Storwize purchase, an unusual length of time for a serial entrepreneur. The opportunity to pilot a business that’s been building momentum with the rapid shift to flash storage may have been too good an opportunity to pass up. IBM was ranked the number one all-flash storage array vendor in 2014 by Gartner Inc.

The news is likely to be a blow to copy-management vendor Catalogic Software Inc., which brought Walsh on as CEO less than two years ago. The Syncsort, Inc. spin-off has won praise for reducing enterprise storage costs by automating copy management using the snapshot and replication technologies of existing storage and virtual infrastructure rather than dedicated equipment. It updated its core product earlier this week. Catalogic appointed Ken Barth, a member of its Board of Directors and the founder of TekTools, Inc. as president and CEO.

“Ed is most known for being a ‘change agent,’ including his ability to drive transformation and lead teams to embrace a new direction,” IBM said in a statement.  “Ed has served as CEO at four key storage innovation organizations.”