EMC Corp, Hopkinton, Massachusetts has come a long way since it was an upstart trying to win a little business away from now-defunct Prime Computer Inc by offering add-on memory for Prime minis – and inviting lawsuits in the process. The company’s president, Michael Ruettgers, has been in Tokyo extolling the virtues of his company ahead of its establishment of a Japanese subsidiary, and he told the locals that he sees sales in the Asia-Pacific area, including Japan, growing swiftly to 7% of its overall revenues in 1994, up from just 4% two years ago. The region, particularly Japan, is one of the fastest growing for company, which has made its fortune by beating IBM Corp hollow to bringing mainframe disk arrays to market, and gone on to confound sceptics that said that its window of opportunity would soon be closed. He said revenues for the 1994 fiscal year, which started on January 2, are estimated by analysts to be up about 50% to $1,200m, but was not going to endorse or question the forecast. EMC saw its turnover double last year and nearly double the year before, taking it up into the Fortune 500 list. Ruettgers reckons its share of the IBM mainframe disk storage business grew to 14% in 1993, up from just 3% in 1992. He is not worried about the fading mainframe, saying that he believed mainframes and mid-range computers would exist for a long time. EMC is anyway diversifying its product line and engineering versions of its disk arrays for client-server computing, and hopes its customers will remain on board.
Content from our partners
