Tucci Talks Up EMC's Future

BOSTON -- EMC CEO Joe Tucci today promised the coming midrange Clariion systems will be more than a refresh, extolled the value of storage appliances, and hinted that his company could dabble in consumer products down the road.

At the EMC World user conference here today, Tucci addressed more than 100 journalists at company headquarters in a far-ranging question-and-answer session. Perhaps the biggest surprise was his answer to a question about the company's interest in consumer products. Tucci says EMC would consider manufacturing -- but not marketing -- consumer devices.

"If we take a short walk, I can show you some very interesting home and desktop products we've built," Tucci said. "These are prototypes. The question is, 'How do you take it to market?' EMC is a B2B company, there's not a lot of B2C [business to consumer] expertise on my top team, including me.

"If we did it, we'd probably do something similar to what Cisco did. Cisco could have built that home router but bought Linksys because they got people who understood the consumer market and got a channel. The other way is to build a product, then give the product to consumer companies and have them give us a fee or percentage of their success. The only way we wouldn't do it is to do it ourselves. We'd kind of take the 'Intel Inside' approach."

Tucci didn't offer to take that walk or give any other details on the consumer products. He also wasn't much more forthcoming about the new Clariion than he has been up to now.Tucci admitted during EMC's earnings call last week and during Monday's EMC World keynote speech that a new set of Clariion SANs are coming, but he did not reveal specifics. (See EMC Hiccups, Waits for Clariion.) He did promise today that the upgrade would include more than 4-Gbit/s connectivity."We said we would refresh our Clariion line, which is one of our key product lines. I said this is not only a refresh, it's a significant jump. Every so many years, you take a real jump, and the next two or three are mid-life kickers. This product is a real new product. We will come in with them this quarter. Obviously, that hasn't happened yet."

Tucci also amplified comments made earlier today by EMC chief development officer Mark Lewis that EMC is looking to sell more appliances running software stacks, such as the file virtualization package it acquired by buying Rainfinity and the Smarts Application Discovery Manager it launched Monday. (See EMC Refreshes NAS, SAN and EMC Stays Smart.)

EMC's goal is to sell more software on appliances than on big storage systems, Tucci said. The idea is to pre-test software on an appliance and reduce the impact the applications have on other devices.

"If you talk to a CIO, I think that person would tell you the number one problem is complexity. Environments are too sensitive to change. You have to manage change control, then test and test and test before they put anything even close to production. None of that testing helps the company, and it's not value-added time.

"We're looking at appliances that can be easily tested and installed without disrupting something else. We're still going to sell more enterprise solutions, but there will be more of a move to appliances to try and cut through complexity issues CIOs are wrestling with."Tucci says one thing EMC won't change is its acquisitions strategy. He's looking to keep them coming, primarily in software and services.

"Primarily the acquisitions we're looking at are in software and services. That doesnt say we wouldn't do a systems acquisition, but when I look at a list of most likely, it's mostly software and regional-based services companies.

"We have not acquired many hardware companies. Actually, I don't think we acquired any since Data General in 1999. We acquired FilePool in Belgium-- that was basically a software company -- but that led us to a hardware product [Centera]." (See EMC Preps Centera.)

Indeed, for Tucci, the main purpose of new storage companies is to be acquisition fodder for the big guys.

"There are too many competitors in storage, it's a crowded market. Some of these companies want to start up and get bought out for technology reasons, so there will always be new storage companies. But I think there are more companies hawking storage today than can possibly survive."Tucci addressed the issue in response to a question about whether he was concerned about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's $150 million investment in storage startup Pillar Data. (See Pillar CEO Talks Roadmap.)"Oracle did not invest in -- what's the name, Pillar?" Tucci said. "It was Larry Ellison's personal investment. He is wealthy, he has an investment arm, he invests in a lot of companies, and he invested in Pillar. To date, I don't worry about Pillar."

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

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