Latchford: I can answer that by expanding on my answers to the previous question:
- Know your data: Analyse your data and identify duplicate, redundant and non-valid data. Delete or archive this to improve storage capacity utilisation.
- Automate and manage active data: Create a pool of storage with IBM's storage virtualisation. Manage data via policies and place it on the most appropriate device according to its value to the business. This improves utilisation of capacity across all classes of storage.
- Archive and dispose of inactive data: Archive and delete data based on the age or the event, and improving utilisation and TCO by archiving inactive data to lower cost media.
Latchford: IBM is able to offer customers a comprehensive mix of hardware, software and services, including specialists with deep industry knowledge. Can EMC match this?
Redman: EMC is the storage and information management leader from a market-share perspective. This is backed up by our growth (customers are voting with their wallets), and analysts like Gartner who place EMC in the leadership quadrant for six key categories. As a market leader with over 22,000 employees and a range of partners, EMC meets and exceeds our customers' needs everyday.
Redman: What is your storage platform strategy -- will you continue to have an OEM relationship or are you going to produce your own technology?
Latchford: IBM's strategy is to make available to our customers the best technology in the market. The IBM DS6000 and DS8000 enterprise disk solutions combined with the IBM LTO and 3592 tape technologies are examples of IBM leadership in research, development, and manufacturing of IBM technology. IBM also OEMs a range of products to provide the best technology to our customers. We will continue to OEM selected products where it makes sense; namely to provide value and solutions in a timely fashion for our customers.
Latchford: EMC has been traditionally seen as a big enterprise player. But most Australian companies are SMBs -- how are you working to solve their storage challenges?
Redman: I'm surprised that you are this out of date, or maybe we haven't managed to change people's perceptions! Over the past few years EMC has dramatically increased its product sets, releasing a whole range of new products aimed squarely at the SMB market. For example, EMC released the AX100 which halved the cost of getting into SAN technology, which today is in the market at about $8000. Earlier in the year we released four Express Solutions aimed at solving SMBs' issues around backup, storage consolidation, archive, and e-mail. These solutions include a range of EMC software, EMC services, and EMC storage systems, built into a solution to solve typical SMB issues that they have been telling us they are facing.
I think the SMB customers themselves are also saying that we are relevant with over 160 new customers purchasing EMC for the first time last year. When you add these new customers to the growth in our market share, today EMC is more relevant than ever to the SMB market.
In fact, the ACA did some research at the beginning of the year into what problems the typical SMB has when it comes to their IT infrastructure. Interestingly 19 percent of SMBs say that backup, archive, and recovery are driving their spending decisions. Backup and e-mail are also driving their need for additional storage, and EMC, with our backup and e-mail management software range (including products from Legato and Dantz) provide the cornerstone for a very strong story for any SMB or mid-sized company.
Redman: What does the OEM strategy mean to the customers of IBM?
Latchford: In a word -- choice. A combination of IBM manufacturing and OEM relationships gives IBM's customers access to the best technology at the lowest cost-of-ownership, end-to-end solutions, and a complete portfolio of storage, servers, and services.
Latchford: What routes to market -- such as the business partner channel, Dell, and its direct sales force -- will EMC use to deliver the storage router to customers, and how will those routes to market be enabled upon general availability?
Redman: The EMC Invista virtualisation product will be available through EMC and all of our EMC Velocity partners. All EMC products have a standard set of partner enablement tools and certification. Our channel team is in the process of rolling out those programs to our partners.
Redman: IBM has both called Invista [storage virtualisation software] the "storage industry's version of a cap gun" and EMC "a strong competitor". Which is it?
Latchford: EMC has traditionally been a strong competitor against IBM in the disk market place. However, when it comes to storage virtualisation, EMC has lagged the industry. IBM announced storage virtualisation in 2003 and recently released the seventh generation of storage virtualisation software. Robust and functional, the IBM virtualisation software supports all the major server and storage vendors in the industry (including support for the EMC CX and DMX disk products). In comparison, EMC recently announced Invista, an unproven technology that provides a fraction of IBM's virtualisation software capabilities. So while we respect EMC, we don't believe Invista is going to deliver on customers needs when it comes to storage virtualisation.
Latchford: A lot of EMC's recent growth seems to have come from its acquisitions. How are you going to continue growing once no more consolidation is possible?
Redman: EMC has definitely been growing fast. In fact, last year EMC grew by 32 percent, but an apples-to-apples comparison shows that EMC's "traditional business" grew by 21 percent last year. (That is without the major acquisitions.) That was the fastest growth of any top 10 IT company last year, showing EMC's strategy of acquiring growing companies whose technologies complete the ILM strategy is delivering results. Last year the market for the top eight storage vendors grew by US$1.7 billion and EMC grew by US$1.2 billion, so it's quite clear that customers are choosing EMC to solve their information and storage problems.
While the acquisitions strategy is bearing fruit and strengthening, last quarter EMC CLARiiON's revenues grew by 47 percent year over year and EMC Celerra NAS revenue grew by 40 percent. Not only has EMC grown but our business has changed. Today 37 percent of our business comes from software and 17 percent comes from services. That change means that today, which may surprise many people, EMC is the seventh largest software company in the world.
With some of our core products growing at plus 40 percent, EMC subsidiaries like VMware growing at over 100 percent -- I believe EMC will keep growing much faster than the market.
Redman: It has been announced that IBM currently has over 1000 customers using its virtualisation technology in a production environment. How many of these customers are in Australia?
Latchford: IBM has more than 30 customers in Australia using IBM's storage virtualisation technology. This is proportional to IBM Australia's share of the IBM storage business worldwide.
One of these customers is TransAction Solutions who have said that virtualisation has solved its problem of having mission critical data available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and has made the business better able to respond to changes in its business.
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