“Store”,
“Optimize”, “Protect” and “Leverage” were the 4 buzz words at the EMC
Analyst Day which was recently hosted at Bangalore. These 4 words also
resemble EMC’s key business segments viz. Information storage, CMA, RSA
(the security division) and VMware. A one day event, full of
presentations from some of the key EMC senior executives were pointing
towards the fact that EMC doesn’t want to be “just a storage vendor”
anymore, rather it wants to become an end-to-end solution provider for
the most critical asset any organization has i.e. Information.
The initial presentations by Steve Leonard, Senior VP APJ and Manoj
Chugh, President, India & SAARC briefed us on the revenue generated by
EMC in 2006, its different strategies, EMC’s eco-system and the market
opportunities lying ahead in the APJ region, particularly in India.
Steve clearly mentioned that EMC is not going to compete head-to-head
with rivals such as HP and IBM in the SMB space unless and until EMC
gets its foundation right. But by no means has it said that EMC is not
going to focus on the SMB space. Regarding eco-system partners, EMC is
not going to play the number game, on the other way round EMC is going
to leverage its existing partners (may it be global, local or SI)
optimally to establish strong foothold in the APJ region. The year 2006,
produced strong financial results for EMC with almost all their business
segments having double-digit growth rate. Both these senior executives
were pretty confident of maintaining this spree of healthy growth-rate.
The second half of the day was particularly focused on the 4 pillars of
EMC. Barry Ader, Senior Director, Storage Product Marketing described
the various storage offerings (hardware as well as software). Few
enhancements especially one around EMC Clariion CX310 signifies that EMC
has now started leveraging the acquisitions (plenty of those done in
recent past). New offerings from EMC are quite innovative, in particular
Avamar, the de-duplication tool, is something which will heavily attract
enterprise customers.
Rob Sadowski, Director, RSA Product Marketing described the shift in the
market place from Perimeter-based security to Information-centric
security and how RSA is better positioned to serve their customers.
TekPlus believes that the approach is quite right but only securing
stagnant/residing information will not solve the purpose. Vendors who
can secure both stagnant as well as moving information coupled with
physical security will stand tall in the market place. At present no
vendor has that end-to-end solution offering but few are well equipped
to become a key player in this market. TekPlus strongly believes that
the vendor who accomplishes this mark soon will enjoy a healthy first
mover advantage and the whole bunch of competitors will follow in due
course of time.
Last but not the least was the presentation by Peter Eck, Director,
Offer Marketing. The new SMARTS Resource management offering is unique
in its own rights. The features provided by this solution are good
enough to attract any enterprise customer as they directly resolve
enterprise pain-points such as reducing TCO, maximizing value, ensuring
availability of mission-critical resources etc. If EMC executes this
right and the marketing message is clear enough, EMC can create huge
dominance in this market space.
TekPlus
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TekPlus believes that the EMC strategies are quite fruitful if EMC plays
the cards in the right fashion at right time, especially the “One
voice/One face to the customer” strategy. This will only payoff if the
level of integration between the products from different segment is
increased. We would like to see more consolidation from EMC across the
board especially with the technologies that are recently acquired. EMC
has to quickly get their act together and start hitting the SMB space
with full force because if you want to establish a strong foothold in
APJ region, SMB market is the key to success!!!
