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November 23, 2006

EMC still in acquisition mode

One of the messages that came out of the recent EMC analyst event was that the company will continue to make acquisitions to enhance its product line. The company has acquired more than 20 software companies over the last three years but there are still gaps in its portfolio. To plug one of these holes, in its security offerings, EMC should look to the access control area for its next purchase.

By CBR Staff Writer

EMC’s acquisitions over the past few years, which include Documentum, Legato, RSA Security and VMware, have helped it evolve its business from a storage-only vendor to a company focused on delivering solutions for the entire information infrastructure. It is, therefore, not surprising that the company has declared its intention to continue with this strategy.

The analyst event mapped out the roadmap and recent developments in a number of key areas for EMC, and it soon became clear that the major theme for EMC is still information lifecycle management (ILM), and that most of its acquisitions build on this strategy.

EMC’s storage hardware strategy has taken something of a back seat in recent times as the company has evolved itself into a vendor of software as well as hardware, through its acquisition of software vendors. In fact, the company now derives more than 50% of its revenues from software.

However, during the event, the company attempted to rectify the situation by announcing a number of new storage hardware products, which included additions to the DMX 3 system, which allows organizations to provide tiered storage. This is part of EMC’s ILM strategy, as it provides the ability to store data on the most appropriate medium according to the value and age of a piece of data.

The next stage in EMC’s strategy should be to allow the management of this tiered storage through its Documentum EMC platform via policies that automatically move data from one storage tier to another, as it ages or its value to the organization changes. The Symmetrix DMX-3 is a scalable system that supports from 96 to 2,400 drives and over a petabyte of storage.

EMC has also enhanced its Clariion mid-range storage system by providing Fibre Channel and iSCSI in a single model, and again supporting tiered storage. In addition to hardware, EMC has also enhanced its storage management software, making it easier to manage multiple storage devices through a single management console.

The fact that EMC now includes sessions on software products such as Documentum, and its recently acquired RSA Security portfolio, reflects the extent to which the company has diversified away from its storage roots to become a multiple product vendor. The Documentum session showed how the Captiva imaging product and Authentica, the digital rights management application, have both been integrated into the Documentum platform.

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Despite all of the acquisitions that EMC has made, there are still gaps in its portfolio, and the next acquisition should be in the access control area to plug the hole in its security offerings and enable it to provide a full identity and access management solution.

Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)

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