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EMC CEO tips hat on future storage plans

At a media event in Sydney, EMC CEO, Joe Tucci said the company is working on storage tuned to the needs of Web 2.0 apps and also plugged the company's deduplication product.

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  • Simon Sharwood, Contributor, Australia
Published: 26 Mar 2007 1:00
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.

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"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."

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