EMC Reinvents Itself, Again

The Hopkinton, Mass.-based company started in 1979 making office furniture, and two years later moved into the memory upgrade market. It started working with midrange and mainframe storage systems in the late 1980s, introduced its first Symmetrix array in 1990, got into the midrange storage market with its Data General acquisition in 1999, and into the midsize storage channel in 2003.

Now, EMC is once again giving itself a complete makeover by moving into the consumer and SOHO products and services business, based on its pending acquisition of Iomega and its Mozy online data protection service, as well as into online collaboration and social networking around its content management offerings.

Despite a very healthy traditional storage business, the move is essential to EMC as it looks to the future data protection and management needs of customers. For VARs it's important because they will find a increasingly nimble EMC tackling segments of the market it has never operated in before. That leaves VARs with a choice: partner with a brand name vendor remodeling itself to meet customers' changing requirements, or compete against one of the true storage-focused heavyweights.

'Continual Transformation'

Frank Hauck, executive vice president of global marketing and customer quality, likens EMC's continual transformation to what hockey great Wayne Gretzky said about the best direction to move. "Gretzky said, 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been,'" Hauck said. "We're going to where the customer pain point is."

Hauck said that in his previous position as CIO at EMC, he would only listen to sales reps who called on him if they could answer three questions: Can they help me drive revenue? Can they make my company more productive? And can they help me drive better relationships with my customers?

"Customers are looking for strategic partners," he said. "All of us want to broaden the portfolio. We want to allow them to use their content to bring in more business and more leads."

The face of the new EMC was revealed during May's EMC World conference, but it's part of a process that has been going on for years, said Dan Carson, vice president of marketing and business development at Open Systems Solutions Inc., a Willow Grove, Penn.-based solution provider.

"EMC's been increasingly paying attention to the entry marketplace," Carson said. "There's less margin in that market because there's more competition. But it's where the higher growth is."

For EMC, the move into smaller markets is possible because it already has the technology, Carson said. "EMC has been traditionally taking technology from its enterprise side and repositioning it for smaller markets," he said. "For instance, EMC's replication technology has made it from its Legato line to the midrange."

One major change for EMC is to reach into cloud computing by expanding its Mozy online data protection platform with new service offerings.

Hundreds of thousands of individual consumers and thousands of large companies are customers of the Mozy online data protection business, said Joe Tucci, chairman, president and CEO of EMC. "In the future, we want millions of individuals as customers, and more large enterprises, and we want to expand more into the midrange business space," Tucci said.

Cloud Computing

EMC is providing huge growth opportunities to its partners with Mozy, said Vance Checketts, COO for the service. "Cloud computing goes beyond backup," he said. "It includes synchronization, sharing and other things customers can do once their data is in the cloud. And resellers will reap the benefit."

Mozy is EMC's first step into the cloud, Checketts said. "We're keyed to the cloud computing strategy of EMC," he said.

If so, EMC has made a misstep, said Zac Childress, president of DarwinTech, Inc., an Oxford, Mich.-based provider of services to the health-care industry which partnered with Mozy until the EMC acquisition.