EMC's Ex-CTO On Why He Left For a Smaller Storage Player

After a three-year run as chief technology officer of EMC's information management product line, George Symons has jumped over to closely held Yosemite, a substantially smaller provider of backup software that competes with EMC's Retrospect software.

Symons was also a key architect of Legato's information lifecycle management strategy prior to its acquisition by EMC. In an interview with VARBusiness senior editor Jeffrey Schwartz, Symons shares his reason for joining the struggling company and his plans for Yosemite.

VB: What drew you to Yosemite?
Symons: The SMB space they were in. If you look at data protection technology, in general, small and medium-size businesses or small commercial businesses are a tremendous, growing market and opportunity for this kind of product. Yosemite is well-positioned there. Second was the existing partnerships Yosemite has with Dell, HP and some strong distributor relationships with companies like Ingram. The company has a solid product, and I see a real opportunity to grow it.

VB: There are a lot of companies in the backup and recovery software space. How do you see Yosemite growing in that market?
Symons: Yosemite has been around a long time, so there is a strong installed base for the product. There's a solid reputation for a good quality product. The partnerships are critical, both in terms of the channel partners as well as the OEM partners. And it has a good focus on ease of use. There's still more work to differentiate the company, but it has all the basic building blocks.

VB: How do you see differentiating the company?
Symons: In this changing marketplace, you've got to put an emphasis on the customer and an ease of doing business. We can effectively do that. Second, [you've got to put] a focus across all of the technologies that are important, whether it's laptops, desktop or servers, have a broad product that can hit all of those different needs of an organization, and really target disk as a backup medium. The market is changing and disk will be critical going forward.

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VB: That's going to be a critical area for Yosemite, which is best known for its tape backup software.
Symons: Exactly, but there's been a lot of investment in disk, and there's even a built-in virtual tape library that the company hasn't talked about.

VB: You will have some large rivals, including your alma mater with its Retrospect software, Symantec and, of course, Microsoft. Is there room for [so many additional] smaller players?
Symons: I think there is room for smaller players. Not all the larger players are easy to do business with. I am not talking about EMC so much as Symantec and some other players. A small organization can adapt to smaller VARs and the needs of customers better. And we can support OEMs better. [There is room for a] small player that can bring the right product, services and support.

NEXT: Yosemite and the future of its relationship with Redmond.

VB: Yosemite was, perhaps, the earliest of public supporters of Microsoft's Data Protection Manager; Microsoft recently said the next release will support tape natively. Will that change your focus on that relationship?
Symons: There's always value in adding value around Microsoft technologies, so we will look to see if there are ways we could provide value and offer a better solution. By the same token, I think there are clearly areas we will have a differentiated product as well.

VB: Do you see broadening the product focus or expanding into new technologies?
Symons: Better technologies for leveraging disk as a target is an area we need to expand from a technology point of view. As we look at the laptop space, that's a technology area to expand. I think there are some partnerships we are looking at that will get us some further technologies.

VB: Can you elaborate on better technologies that can leverage disk?
Symons: A hot topic is single-instance storage or data elimination. We need to be along that technology curve because right now you can store a week or a month of information, but we need to be able to store a year or multiple years on disk, and that's focused on data elimination. Interestingly enough, that's done today at a file level. So if I found two identical files, I only keep one file. But if you look at the enterprise level, it's going to subfile data elimination. I think we will be able to bring that to the SMB space and it will have as much impact there as it does in the enterprise.

VB: And what do you see looking further into the laptop segment?
Symons: There's more need for remote backup and management that drives caching so you can do laptop backups. It's all about ease of use; it has to be end user-driven from a recovery and backup point of view. That is an area we can participate in very aggressively and one I see that's important in this space.

VB: Do you see making changes to Yosemite's channel program?
Symons: Yes. It's about positioning. Yosemite made an attempt about a year ago to target enterprises as well as SMBs. The real focus is to say we're not an enterprise player. We will have an SMB focus. From a channel perspective, I want to reach out to the VARs. We have some strong relationships with distributors, but as a smaller player we need more direct contact and support of the VARs as well.

VB: How will you go about doing that?
Symons: Targeted marketing and programs. We don't have all the plans put together yet, but we will look at some vertical VARs as well as more targeted horizontals. We will make sure we have the value prop they need. We really need to do demand creation with the VARs.