EMC Groups Software Lines Under One Unit

Banking on the high profitability and growth of its software business, storage vendor EMC last week created a dedicated unit that combines its Legato, Documentum and Open Software organizations under one umbrella.

VMware, however, which EMC recently acquired, will continue to be run as a separate, wholly owned subsidiary that will work with EMC competitors. The new EMC Software Group will be co-managed by executive vice presidents David De Walt and Mark Lewis, said EMC executives.

With its renewed, heightened focus on the software stack of its solutions, the Hopkinton, Mass.-based company is particularly focusing on taking market share from rival Veritas Software, De Walt said.

"We have to beat Veritas, and we are," he said. EMC has acquired at least a dozen software companies in the past several years. The separate software organization will, in essence, become a new, $1.5 billion software company with 4,000 employees, more than 1,600 of whom are developers.

Separately, EMC and Advanced Digital Information Corp. (ADIC) last week unveiled an agreement under which EMC intends to resell ADIC's Scalar family of tape libraries to its customers starting in July. Under the pact, ADIC plans to replace its current supplier of hard disks in its Pathlight VX virtual tape solution with networked storage products from EMC's Clariion line.

One solution provider, who preferred to remain anonymous, lauded the creation of EMC's new software organization but was less enthusiastic about EMC's tape library agreement with ADIC.

"EMC wants to sell their software and their [disk] spindles," the partner said. "Everything else is in the way. If EMC is OEMing tape, then the tape doesn't have the margin of disk and software. If you were steering that ship, which way would you go?"