Joseph Tucci, EMC

What it means: Services, software and hardware. EMC's Joe Tucci has pegged these three areas as the main revenue drivers for a storage company that built its reputation in the late '90s as a "win-at-all-costs" machine. Tucci says EMC will keep investing in the right areas,first and foremost services. And right on the heels of that is technology. Another big push is in software. EMC executives say more than 70 percent of their research and development money goes toward software. The goal of all this is to grow the company when the economy turns healthy again.

VARBusiness' View: EMC is heading in the right direction when it comes to its focus on software. The price of hardware is plummeting,so it's not too hard to read the writing on the wall. The problem, analysts say, is that EMC reached some incredible revenue heights during the late '90s, and it's going to be difficult to do a repeat performance. Moreover, EMC needs to shed its reputation as a proprietary company and become an open-software organization. That is a difficult challenge when so much of its heritage is in hardware. Even harder is trying to convince the industry that EMC has changed its proprietary ways to one that espouses open systems. Furthermore, there's only so much mileage the "100 percent dedicated company" message can get. Better yet: Proclaim to be the only platform-neutral supplier of storage solutions. But that will have to wait. Shedding a proprietary image comes first.

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