EMC to Tout Integration, ILM Progress

At EMC’s meeting with analysts in New York City last
August, CEO Joseph Tucci told
attendees to expect a lot of activity from the storage vendor directed
toward furthering its information lifecycle management (ILM)
strategy.

This time around, at its annual analyst meeting Thursday in New York,
analysts said
attendees can expect more of the same, but that probably more specific
details
about the integration of the company’s three major acquisitions of last
year would emerge.

The Hopkinton, Mass., company acquired
archiving specialist Legato Systems for $1.3 billion, enterprise
content
management provider Documentum for $1.7 billion and server virtualization provider VMware
for $635 million within a six-month span.

The aggressive purchasing sparked a whirlwind of press and buzz around
the company. Some analysts praised EMC for diversifying its revenue
streams while others were critical, fearing the integration of
disparate
companies would be too tricky.

But the vendor is intent on building and offering a complete platform
of
tiered storage for ILM, a practice that has kicked around the industry
for
awhile but one that EMC lit a fire under.

Just as service-oriented architectures are the latest craze in
distributed
computing, ILM is being touted by several vendors as a solid approach
to
so-called “cradle to grave” management, or shepherding information or
data
through various courses of its existence, from creation to archiving,
to its
ultimate purging from a computer system.

EMC maintains the key to a proper ILM platform includes several layers
of
automated storage to ferret out data on a network.
The company showed significant steps in its ILM efforts earlier this
week,
unveiling
its Proven compliance software and other offerings, results of Legato
and
Documentum product integration.

This week, Tucci and company are likely to unveil additional product
news
highlighting EMC’s integration efforts, according to those familiar
with
the company’s plans, such as Enterprise Storage Group’s Peter Gerr.

“From a financial standpoint, they’re going to drive home their
continued
execution and return to profitability and growth of the company and all
of
the segments,” Gerr said. “They’ve also gotten some good market
share headlines from other analyst firms.”

Sageza Research Director Charles King agreed.

“I have to expect that they’re pretty happy with the IDC numbers from
last
week, so I imagine they’ll spend a good amount of time talking about
that,”
said King, speaking of the market research firm’s recent storage
statistics
for the first quarter 2004.

EMC took
the
leadership position from HP in the external disk storage systems
market,
with 26 percent year-over-year revenue growth for a 20.2 percent
revenue
market share in the first quarter, according to IDC.

The company didn’t stop there, leading the external RAID market with 22
percent revenue share to HP’s 16.9 percent. EMC also held onto the top
spot
in the total networked storage market with 28.5 percent revenue share,
followed by HP with 22.8 percent and IBM with 10.5 percent.

That news bodes well for EMC, which, as a maker of storage hardware,
lost
market share, as the industry commoditized and rivals IBM ,
HP and Hitachi Data Systems built
boxes
just as well.

In other areas, Gerr said he expects EMC to underscore the continued
success
of the Dell relationship, but will also point to the non-Dell channel,
including the AX100
and
NetWin
110, which recently came out.

“Although Dell is selling a version of those products, those products
will
also help EMC in the care and feeding of its non-Dell channel,” Gerr
said.
“I think it’s an important move in terms of EMC moving into a new
market,
which is the small- and medium-sized business, or even the entry-level
market. That’s a market that traditionally is not aware of EMC as a
supplier. It will be interesting to see the success of those products.”

Gerr also said it’s likely EMC won’t have news regarding the
integration of
its VMware acquisition until later this year. But he does think EMC
might
hint at future architectures or platform enhancements for its high-end
Symmetrix or mid-range CLARiiON systems.

Despite the seemingly successful integration thus far, Gerr had one
parting
question to sum up EMC’s current status: “I wonder how they are going
to
build a bridge from where they are in terms of being a systems seller
to
being a provider of complete ILM solutions.”