EMC has set aside £1.4bn to buy Indian storage startups as it tries to meet growing customer expectations.
The industry stalwart is particularly interested in flash storage and software-defined storage (SDS) companies, according to Chirantan Desai, the president of the firm’s emerging technologies division.
He told The Economic Times in India that the storage giant has already contacted some startups it has an interest in acquiring, and that flash and SDS in particular would help EMC keep up with customer demands for the performance of enterprise applications.
However, its acquisition budget will be matched by internal funds for research and development, while it hopes to boost its 3,500-strong Indian staff with more data scientists, storage specialists and engineering graduates.
Desai told the publication: "The new set of enterprise applications are extremely performance hungry, creating new set of demands from the IT infrastructure. We are investing heavily in technology to ensure that infrastructure doesn’t become the bottleneck."
EMC recently threw cloud storage startup Egnyte off its partner programme, seemingly after an un-sanctioned press release in which Egnyte announced a cloud integration with EMC’s VNX hardware.
However, Egnyte claimed EMC’s decision may have been influenced by a desire to protect EMC’s own sync file and share product, Syncplicity, which Egnyte claimed its own services had been compared to in the press.
