EMC wants to position itself as an end-to-end provider
of hardware, software and services to meet all of its customers'
storage needs, chief executive officer Joe Tucci told analysts
yesterday.
Through internal development and acquisitions such as its $1.3bn
buyout of software maker Legato Systems, EMC is expanding its
product portfolio, services capabilities and partnerships.
It is also cutting operational costs and speeding its product
cycles, Tucci said, as the company prepares for what he sees as a
transition in the storage industry toward providing "information
lifecycle management", or ILM.
EMC's ILM strategy is about expanding the storage market by
offering customers new technologies for optimising their data
backup, recovery and manipulation operations, executives said. In
line with that vision, EMC is adding low-end products and
rebuilding its software strategy to offer customers access to a
complete portfolio.
The company is looking to enter the tape backup market,
dominated by Veritas and IBM, possibly through a partnership,
according to Dave Donatelli, EMC's executive vice president of
storage platform operations. While EMC focuses on faster, more
expensive disc-based storage systems, it recognises that tape is
not going away.
A full line of storage software is key to EMC's end-to-end
vision, and it has, in the past year, filled in significant
functionality gaps, said Mark Lewis, EMC's executive vice president
of software. By the end of 2004, EMC will have its software set
completed, adding pieces such as automatic provisioning and
replication technology throughout its entire product lineup, he
added.
With more than 200 storage software tools available in the
market, most of the technical challenges facing customers have been
solved, according to Lewis. That obstacle that remains is
integrating those pieces to ease management burdens - and EMC is
confident that its software portfolio will fill that market void,
he said.
"The problem is really more about complexity," Lewis said. "What
we need to do take the pieces and try for simplicity."
As EMC expands its product set, it also aims to extend its
customer base, revamping sales tactics to reach new markets.
The EMC of the past was a direct-sales-oriented company offering
its high-end Symmetrix systems, and targeted one customer segment,
large global enterprises, said marketing and business development
head David Goulden. Now, it has added a direct sales force to
target midsized businesses and is building a network of channel
partners to overlap in the midsized market and exclusively target
smaller businesses.
Those non-enterprise market segments represent up to half of the
storage market, Goulden estimated. So far this year, EMC has signed
up 1,000 new small and midsized customers, he said.
After posting losses in every quarter last year, EMC pledged to
be profitable throughout 2003. It met that goal in the first two
quarters of the year and expected to do so in the next two, chief
financial officer Bill Teuber said.
Over the past two years, the company has cut several thousand
jobs and shaved $500m off its quarterly break-even cost, bringing
that figure down to $1.26bn in its last quarter.
A consolidation of EMC's design groups intended to lower costs
is also helping to speed its development process, executives said.
By overhauling its product testing process and conducting in
parallel trials that used to be run serially, EMC has cut days and,
in some cases, weeks off product cycles. The high-end DMX2000
storage array EMC introduced earlier this year took 14 days to
test, down from the 30 days of testing needed for its previous top
Symmetrix product.
That shortened product cycle will help EMC as it continues with
the most ambitious product rollout plans in the company's history,
Tucci said. "I honestly believe the storage market will change more
in the next three years than it has in the previous 10 or 12."
Stacy Cowley writes for IDG News Service