Hitachi To EMC: Forget About the APIs
The Hopkinton, Mass.-based company filed suit in both the U.S. International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court in Worcester, Mass. against Japan's Hitachi Ltd. and its U.S. subsidiary Hitachi Data Systems, seeking damages and an injunction preventing Hitachi from importing the software in question into the United States.
Six days later, Hitachi fired back by crafting a patent-infringement lawsuit of its own. The company, which filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, charged that EMC's Symmetrix and Clariion product lines infringe on eight of Hitachi's patents. And they also are seeking an injunction against the future sales of the company's high-end and midrange storage subsystems.
Not only has Hitachi countersued, but they added some icing on the cake. "Hitachi said, 'By the way, you know those negotiations over the APIs? Well, you can forget about them,'" says Dianne McAdam, an analyst with Illuminata, based in Nashua, N.H.
Apparently, Hitachi was in talks with EMC to exchange application program interfaces (APIs) for its WideSky middleware, one of the core pieces to EMC's AutoIS open-storage software initiative. EMC needs the APIs from competitors like Hitachi, the new HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems so that WideSky can serve as the universal translator for umbrella software to manage heterogeneous devices. And software is a critical part of EMC's business, accounting for 22 percent of its $7.1 billion in revenues.
"They were in negotiations for several months, [but that all broke down since EMC initiated the lawsuit," McAdam explains.
Analysts wonder if maybe there isn't another motive behind EMC's legal maneuver. Just days after EMC filed suit, Hitachi announced its TrueNorth storage open-management initiative, as well as new switched-based midrange and high-end subsystems that up the ante in capacity levels.
"I think EMC has lost market share to Hitachi and they were worried about Hitachi's recent announcement. They were pretty scared," McAdam says.
In all fairness, EMC has been trying to work this out for four years now. Spokesperson Anne Pace says the first letter of warning was sent to Hitachi in December 1997, and the first meeting between the companies' representatives occurred in April 1998. Subsequently, they met about nine times
"This was our last resort," she says. "There was absolutely no resolution of this issue over the past four years."
Hitachi has refused to comment on the situation. But on May 8, the International Trade Commission,a quasi-judicial federal agency,voted to investigate EMC's allegations against Hitachi.
Patents Pending
On EMC's part, four of the patents are for software products while the other two are for hardware,specifically EMC's patents on Count Key Data to Fixed Block Architecture and Data Migration Service patents.
The other four patents are tied to two of EMC's prized software products: Time Finder for data mirroring and Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) for remote data replications through VPNs and IP. SRDF, in particular, was developed in part because of customers' experiences during the May 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Pace says.
EMC has devoted an entire section of its Web site to this lawsuit (www .emc.com/ip/). There, it references that on April 28, 1997, EMC announced TimeFinder to create multiple copies of mainframe and open-systems production data. On May 13, Hitachi introduced TimeTraveller, parroting the EMC TimeFinder news release, word for word. That September, Hitachi agreed to withdraw the name TimeTraveller. Today it is known as Shadow Image.
Interestingly, Hitachi says EMC's Clariion subsystem infringes on its patents. EMC, however, was not the initial developer of that product, as it was inherited when the company purchased Data General for $1.1 billion in 1999.
"Nobody ever said that lawsuits had to make sense," McAdam says.