EMC Boasts Big Revenues, Major Products

NEW YORK — Expressing confidence that the IT market has bounced back
strongly from a few sluggish years, EMC’s Joseph Tucci is making some bold predictions.

The company president and chief executive boldly predicted the company would achieve revenues of $8.1 billion and net income of $850 million for 2004.


The sales and earnings prediction was just one of many bullish announcements
executives from the Hopkinton, Mass. information systems vendor made at its
annual analyst meeting Thursday in New York City, and came just 10 months
after EMC embarked on its information lifecycle management (ILM) quest.


There company officials also outlined a fully integrated software division and tipped its hand about the forthcoming Storage Router, a technology breakthrough geared to improve upon and complement intelligent switches made by networking vendors Cisco Systems , Brocade Communications Systems and McData . The company also revealed A tape partnership with ADIC.


Tucci led off the event with a breakdown of the company’s finances over the last few years. He noted that while the company lost $500 million in net income during the dot-com implosion of 2001, then leaked $100 million in 2002, the company rebounded to post $496 million in net income in 2003.


Those numbers were a warm-up for his unusually bold estimate.


Sky High for ILM


“So, we lost $500 million, we lost $100 million, we made $500 million, so where are we going?” Tucci asked rhetorically of a crowd of about 300 at The Equitable Center. “We believe that we have the opportunity this year to do $8.1 million in revenue. That would be a 30 percent growth year over year…. I believe it’s within our reach to do $850 million in net in come this year. That’s a 70 percent growth [year-over-year].”


Tucci then made his pitch for information lifecycle management, which is the company’s broad, deep plan for managing an enterprises information from its creation to its disposal, and represents a $46 billion market potential.

ILM, which vendors like HP , StorageTek , VERITAS , IBM and also embrace in their own way, is a process in which data is shuttled throughout a network, making it easy to store and retrieve. But EMC has made the most investment in its ILM plan, purchasing archiving outfit Legato Systems, content management leader Documentum and server virtualization vendor VMware in 2003.

There are several business drivers for ILM, Tucci said, citing business continuity, compliance, application and server consolidation, and the abundance of unstructured content such as spreadsheets and e-mail.


The opportunity, should EMC perform as planned, would represent year-to-year revenue growth of approximately 30 percent in 2004, on the strength of a combination of hardware, and the company’s enhanced software and services offerings, which accounted for 52 percent of EMC’s revenue last quarter.


Integration and Products to Be


EMC also officially announced the melding of its Legato and Documentum acquisitions into the EMC Software Group, which is led by executive vice presidents Mark Lewis and Dave DeWalt, formerly president and CEO of Documentum. Lewis, formerly EVP of Open Software at EMC, heads development efforts while DeWalt leads sales.


Both work closely together and have pledged to grow EMC’s software and services revenues to $1.5 billion in 2004.


Meanwhile, the company has other plans for VMware, which is lead by co-founder and CEO Diane Greene. While officials refused to divulge future VMware developments, Tucci said the division will stand apart from the software division.


Executives did note that VMware’s charter is to provide the automation capabilities necessary to make ILM work, via virtualization, which allows multiple instances of an application or operating system function one machine.


This so-called “virtual infrastructure” approach will allow businesses to mix and manage their storage and computing infrastructure from one shared pool of resources.


Executive Vice President of Storage Platforms Dave Donatelli said EMC will keep its promise of revamping or upgrading its hardware and software on the platform side every 12 to 18 months. Coming in 2005 is software that allows “non-disruptive movement” and migration of data across storage infrastructure.


Lewis later described EMC’s plans for software that triggers business process management, which will allow organizations to create and automate storage policies based on business processes that will place content in different tiers of storage.


The company is also creating a Storage Router that moves data several times faster than leading data routers and switches. Lewis said the public can expect a beta of this supercharged router in the third quarter 2004. Its architecture is based on SAN controller software running in a network that provides the management capability and based on intelligent switches. Lewis promised the Storage Router would move data with no latency or bandwidth.


A Curious Partnership?


Officials saved the most controversial piece of news for the end when Howard Elias executive vice president of corporate marketing at EMC, said EMC partnered with tape storage provider Advanced Digital Information Corporation (ADIC).


In the deal, for which financial terms were not disclosed, EMC will resell ADIC Scalar tape libraries to pad its ILM portfolio; ADIC will in turn resell EMC CLARiiON CX machines as part of its Pathlight VX virtual tape product. Reselling will begin on July from both parties.


From an industry perspective, the deal is surprising, albeit rumored for months. EMC executives had previously pronounced tape storage, where HP, IBM, ADIC and others toil, as “dead,” and consistently said disk storage would consume tape market share.


EMC no longer expects the demise of tape and Tucci said he expects that tape market, which he admitted being conflicted about, represents a $2.6 billion opportunity. ADIC tape storage will complement and expand EMC’s tiered storage offerings, he said.


The news triggered jeers from EMC rivals HP and IBM.


“What’s really happening is that EMC has now realized the only way to stay competitive is to broaden its portfolio, to meet the depth of companies like HP,” HP said in a company statement. “As Information Lifecycle Management and compliance issues take hold, that full portfolio is key.


IBM was more critical in its statement:


“Finally after years of saying that tape is dead, EMC is validating the role of tape by attempting to emulate IBM’s storage strategy,” said Rich Lechner, Vice President, IBM Storage. “Unfortunately their approach is incomplete. This reseller arrangement doesn’t address a number of critical customer environments including large enterprises with mainframes. It also fails to address the growing business requirement for data retention as addressed by technologies such as WORM tape.”

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