EMC to Revamp Sales Force to Target Network Appliance
--From AOL. -- Cooters
Hopkinton, Massachusetts, Aug. 2 (Bloomberg) -- EMC Corp., the No. 1 seller of computer-data storage for businesses, said it will revamp its sales force to pursue customers in a new but fast- growing storage niche dominated by Network Appliance Inc.
EMC President Joe Tucci said at the company's annual analyst meeting that a new sales team with stronger technological expertise will work to gain market share with a storage technology called network attached storage, or NAS.
NAS allows storage units to attach directly to a company's computer network, or to the Internet, to store data ranging from company records to Web pages. NAS devices, known as network- attached storage appliance, connect to networks of servers, the big machines that power Web sites and corporate internal systems. Storage is becoming more important as companies collect mounds of data on customers, sales and inventory.
``We're going to take leadership from `Net App' -- period,'' Tucci told analysts meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Shares of Network Appliance fell 3 3/8 to 79 1/4 in midafternoon trading; they have risen more than five-fold in the past year. EMC shares fell 9/16 to 81 15/16. They are up 166 percent in the past year.
Network Appliance, based in Sunnyvale, California, holds about 40 percent of the NAS market and EMC about 30 percent, according to the market research firm IDC. NAS is expected to grow from about $1 billion in annual revenue in 1999 to nearly $7 billion in 2003, IDC says.
Competitors in the NAS field include Sun Microsystems Inc., International Business Machines Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. On Monday, Compaq Computer Corp. unveiled an NAS device.
Tucci said EMC will deploy an ``overlay'' sales force of networking experts to seek out new NAS customers in addition to a more traditional sales force focusing on companies according to their size. He declined to say how many salespeople these teams would have.
Network Appliance has focused more on mid-sized companies and EMC on large companies, but Tucci said EMC will increasingly target mid-sized companies. EMC, based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, is in the process of adding to its product line NAS storage devices aimed at mid-sized companies. Its Celerra line has until now focused on large-company NAS storage.
Aug/02/2000 14:39 ET |
