How EMC strives to stay at the forefront
TONY WALTHAM
EMC CEO, president and chairman Joe Tucci. |
Under the leadership of CEO, president and chairman Joe Tucci, EMC has grown dramatically through acquisitions that have provided the company with new technologies it has aggressively rolled into a rapidly-expanding product line.
Most notable, perhaps, has been the content management and archiving platform gained from Documentum, the virtualisation software from the pioneer in this field, VMware, and the security credentials from RSA Security. But the list of products and capabilities from EMC's acquisitions is a long one.
Indeed, of late EMC has been spending an average of $1.8 billion on acquisitions each year and the company has evolved from being primarily hardware (storage arrays) to being mostly software today.
Six years ago, EMC had just three platforms for storage: its ClARiiON storage area network (SAN) disk arrays (derived from its Data General acquisition in 1999), the Celerra network attached storage (NAS) products and its Symmetrix flagship enterprise storage arrays. EMC's customers then were in the enterprise.
Today, its product line-up and customer profile is quite different. EMC has been updating and enhancing these "traditional" products while augmenting them with additional components in the storage infrastructure.
The bigger picture now includes Connectrix SAN connectivity products, RecoverPoint for replication and data protection, Invista for SAN virtualisation, Rainfinity for global file virtualisation, EMC's Centera family of content addressed storage and archiving, the EMC Disk Library, and most recently, Mozy remote backup and LifeLine consumer storage offerings.
Now, these are just the hardware infrastructure components. EMC also has a long list of software tools to make storage administration and management easier, more efficient and reliable.
Put the product portfolios for 2002 and 2008 side by side, as EMC Storage Division President David Donatelli did in consecutive PowerPoint displays during his keynote address at EMC World last month, and the contrast is dramatic.
By any standards, EMC has been an acquisitive company - and one that has been highly successful in integrating products from the companies it acquired into its existing products and services. But it is also now encouraging internal innovation in a big way.
Tucci pointed out in his opening keynote at Las Vegas' Mandalay Bay convention centre last month that EMC had publicly projected annual revenues of $15 billion, and that he would be spending 12 per cent on R&D. This amounts to $1.8 billion - equivalent to EMC's track record for spending on acquisitions.
So where is all this innovation coming from? Visitors who visited the Innovation Showcase on the exhibition floor at EMC World may now have a better insight into this.
The company was presenting an interactive exhibit that illuminated "the way we explored the information infrastructure," as a showcase overview explained.
I learned how EMC had taken a significant initiative last year when it developed an innovation network called EMC One, This is a social media platform that was launched quietly last September and which now has 3,500 registered users and some 30,000 "lurkers" and spans over 80 communities.
Last October an innovation conference attracted over 411 submissions for the best concept from EMC employees in 24 countries. EMC ONE connects people with blogs, wikis, and discussion threads, and EMC senior director for the office of the CTO Heather Healy chracterised the network as "providing tools for a culture of innovation."
In addition, since August 2004 the CTOs of each of EMC's business divisions have met face-to-face every six weeks to discuss advances, reflecting the spirit of innovation in the company, she said.
One component of this is advanced technology solutions development, led by senior director of advanced technology solutions Shawn Douglass. This is part of EMC's office of the CTO that identifies opportunities, evaluates and incubates them through an iterative process in "waterfalls" of four to six weeks, he said.
The idea was to help EMC to explore and develop new markets and market opportunities - such as the initiative to offer online storage to the consumer market, which Douglass indicated has been developed from concept to delivery "in a quarter and a half," or just four and a half months.
SOA architect at EMC's chief technology office Steve Graham explained the concept of Web 2.0 TCE (total customer experience), the winning entry at last October's innovation conference.
This is a mash-up that exposes information from data centre logs so it can be better understood and shared, doing away with the problem of manually correlating information from printouts, consoles and log files to find out what's happening in the data centre.
Web 2.0 was a big wave and many smaller vendors were taking advantage of it, Graham said, adding that the question was "what do we do to use some of the underlying technologies in Web 2.0 to make things easier?" He explained that this project provided "a bird's eye view of the data centre" by bringing pieces of two different domains together, such as richly-modelled log information, generated by the specialised search capabilities of Splunk, and file information.
Linking these two silos in a mash-up with a rich interface could provide insights with a visual map that provided an easy-to-navigate view of the data centre, and this information could further be shared with customers, he said.
Another example in the showcase was the Daoli Grid, a trusted grid infrastructure public wiki. This is a partnership between EMC and four Chinese universities that for the past two years has been exploring the potential of trusted computing and virtualisation that has about 2,000 participants and is open to the public for comment.
Project Futon was another interesting concept on display - the world's first end-to-end management system for consumer-generated multimedia - photographs or videos - with no computer required. Here, a photo frame is the photo manager, while the photos live out in the cloud at "EMC Futon," The device connects to the camera and then to a photo repository in the cloud.
All of this activity - internal innovation and a large acquisition budget - makes EMC a company to watch, especially as it prepares to reach out further with cloud computing services while extending offerings in the consumer and SMB markets with standalone and online storage offerings.
Prev
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
Next
