At a media briefing in Sydney, Australia this week, EMC CEO, Joe
Tucci said the company is working on storage hardware tuned to the
needs of Web 2.0 applications such as serving video online.
When asked to share plans about future storage products, Tucci
said Web 2.0 was a priority.
"When you work with applications like enterprise resource planning
you build storage that can cope with high input/output requirements
…When you do video you need to do other things like manage
bandwidth. We will build for that need, and we will build it
differently to traditional storage equipment," he said.
He declined to say when these products will be announced, but
said development is under way. He also said that EMC feels many of
its customers may not yet have a full appreciation of the company's
offerings, and how they can ease storage management.
"If customers used the tools we have, things would get easier,"
Tucci said, responding to a question from SearchStorage.com.au,
which indicated that storage users often complain of unwelcome
complexity.
He plugged the company's acquisition of Avamar Technologies, a
data deduplication software tool, which he said has great potential
to slow the proliferation of data. Even though this means companies
will require less storage hardware, Tucci said simplification of
storage environments is an area in which EMC plans to lead the
market.
Price is another field in which the company has changed its
tune, after noting that customers often resent the level of storage
spending required to keep up with the data they create.
"Customers do not want to pay a lot for good, reliable storage,"
he said, half-joking. "But today, on every tier, we are priced very
competitively. In the past, we had a fair reputation for charging a
premium," Tucci acknowledged.
Despite the lower pricing, Tucci said EMC's growth prospects
remain strong, although the company expects that expanding sales of
software and services will be the key to keeping margins high.
Tucci said he will look to VMware to provide much of the growth on
the software side of the business and hopes success in that sphere
will boost the company's share price, which has traded in a narrow
band since early 2004.
Tucci said he found the company's share price "aggravating" but
added that yehe believes the company is generally in good health
and has excellent growth prospects.
"There is a horrendous amount of stuff to be stored," he said.
"We'll be fine."