At its annual meeting with analysts on Thursday, the company spelt out its ambitions to dominate in key sectors -- but it faces stiff competition as the market consolidates.
"EMC's market position has never been stronger," said president and chief executive Joe Tucci. "Customers around the world are placing their trust in EMC and our solutions to accelerate their deployment of Information lifecycle management (ILM) and better protect, secure, move, and intelligently manage their information."
Tucci told analysts that he expects the company to grow at 14 per cent, or twice the industry rate, next year. This should bring it to $11 billion in revenue.
The crucial growth area for EMC is in software. While the company continues to introduce bigger and better and faster storage devices, this is a maturing market. Faster than average growth will have to come from storage management software and here, Tucci could point to a figure of 27 per cent, year on year. Worryingly for the company this is a 5 per cent drop compared to the first quarter figure.
The storage software market is warming up, and Symantec's merger with Veritas means another, now larger competitor on the block.
Tucci put these issues on one side, and was keen to stress the vision. "As we evolved from information storage to information lifecycle management, we have dramatically improved our customers' relationships with their information," he said.
But this is a field in which EMC faces wide ranging competition from the major vendors, like IBM and HP and increased competition from Sun Microsystems after its $4.1bm purchase of StorageTek.
EMC's response is to roll out new products -- not just at the top-end but in the mid-range with new CLARiiON servers
Talkback
It is interesting that EMC has identified ILM as key to realising its growth targets. The reason I say this is that The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) (www.snia.org/home), has yet to agree on what ILM actually is and how it can be achieved. The area was discussed in detail at last year's SNIA ILM conference in Long beach, with the industry’s leading body concluding that in the absence of industry standards, ILM is 3 -10 years from being realised, by any vendor.
I also believe that the EMC marketing push with ILM is very contradictory to last week’s announcement from EMC for its new, proprietary big iron DMX-3. This announcement set the clock back for me, to about five years ago, with a long list of feeds and speeds and technical jargon. This shows EMC exactly for what it is:- there is marketing push with solutions but the reality is to sell big boxes. On top of this, we at Hitachi Data Systems also argue that EMC's approach to storage virtualisation is flawed as it adds complexity to the infrastructure by adding another layer of management to the network. In contrast, the HDS developed "controller-based" approach to virtualisation simplifies the network by reducing the layers of complexity, which in turn helps end users lower the management cost of their storage resources.
At Hitachi Data Systems, we believe that EMC's growth plans are based on marketing hype and that it is actually Hitachi Data Systems that is better positioned to capitalise on the growth in storage virtualisation.