Here's the link.
byteandswitch.com
As for that rumor, common EMC and IBM customers already have the clout to make the two work together on their increasingly unique IT environments so that's not too big a deal.
The other rumor is that IBM is going around the industry hustling to put together a coalition against WideSky which really threatens to expose IBM's inherent inability to support the servers and databases of its competitors. EMC and Oracle, for example, have more than 9,000 joint customers in the Global 2000 that IBM would dearly love to peel away. I think, however, that IBM is still trying to go in too many directions at the same time in Storage Software for that kind of coalition-building to succeed.
I actually think that IBM still doesn't know where it wants to go while it continues to streamline the organizational and cost structures of Tivoli and Lotus, the two IBM major acquisitions which were given an unusually wide degree of autonomy until last year when IBM finally decide to integrate the two business units more tightly into the organization.
For example, IBM and Compaq entered into an alliance in 2000 and agreed to make Compaq's out-of-band Versastor (block-level virtualization) technology work with IBM's SANergy (file-level virtualization). IBM and Compaq agreed to terminate that collaboration last year because of the HWP merger so IBM decided to license DataCore's in-band virtualization technology as a band-aid for the low-end market while launching a crash program internally to develop a high-end block-level virtualization product. That effort is going to have its fits and starts.
EMC, on the other hand, is going to keep on using its large installed base to let its new software products get off with a running start in order to gather the sales momentum that will carry it to new customers outside its installed base not only for software, but for hardware and services as well at the core and at the edge.
Again, note the powerful earnings leverage right around 2Q02 or 3Q02 when EMC should already be in a position to match or exceed $100M in annual operating expense reductions with $100M or more in additional software revenues with 85%-90% gross margin. |
