What's Next, EMC?

The logical question now is, what's next?

During the Legato acquisition news conference, EMC President and CEO Joe Tucci said, essentially, that EMC has the will to make more acquisitions. The company also certainly has the means. Revenue and earnings are improving after several quarters of drought brought on by slack IT spending and the wait for a new line of enterprise storage arrays. And as of June 30, EMC was sitting on a hoard of nearly $2 billion in cash.

So what's next?

A couple of interesting--and sensible--possibilities about EMC's future are being bandied about by industry observers. One is a potential acquisition of Overland Storage, which would bring EMC a number of benefits that would complement its existing product line.

Even though EMC has always tried to get customers to move away from tape and do backups on very expensive duplicate Symmetrix disk arrays, Overland's tape automation business would give EMC another way to get into the customer data center--especially in the midrange, where Overland is especially strong. EMC says it wants to be a software company, but what company wouldn't want to beef up its hardware offerings as well?

Another thing EMC would get with Overland is a midrange channel to complement its existing Clariion channel and the channel it acquired with its new toy, Legato. Except for some OEMs, Overland is all-channel, all the time. EMC knows its growth will come from the midrange and that it can't tackle the midrange without the channel.

The integration with Overland probably would go rather smoothly. The two vendors already are working together thanks to the legacy OEM agreement Overland had with Astrum for its SRM software suite.

Finally, EMC would get Okapi, the iSCSI appliance developer that Overland purchased in June. Okapi's+would boost EMC in the midrange and complement last month's introduction of iSCSI capability for its high-end DMX arrays.

Another interesting rumor I find quite plausible is EMC acquiring one of a number of small, established or startup developers of server provisioning software.

While EMC hasn't been in the server business--except for a brief time after its acquisition of Data General a few years ago--server provisioning would boost its standing against Veritas Software, which late last year purchased Jareva Technologies, a developer of server provisioning software.

But EMC had better hurry, since a string of acquisitions have already gone down. In addition to Veritas' Jareva acquisition, Sun Microsystems acquired Terraspring last year, Mountain View Data acquired PowerCockpit technology from TurboLinux in February and IBM acquired Think Dynamics in May.

Acquisition candidates in this space for EMC include ProvisionSoft, an Andover, Mass.-based developer of storage and server provisioning technology which, besides being a neighbor to EMC, is also a part of EMC's developer program. ProvisionSoft belongs to Hitachi Data System's developer group as well.

Another possibility would be Opsware, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based data center automation software developer. Opsware currently has partnerships with server vendors such as HP, IBM and Sun.

And there must be other candidates to become part of EMC. Any thoughts or rumors, please feel free to let me know.

Still readin' and writin',
Joseph Kovar

JOSEPH F. KOVAR is the storage editor for CRN.