EMC: Our Analysis to Undercut IBM and Oracle
blogs.forbes.com
"EMC’s plan to win in the data analysis market looks something like this: Sell stuff to everyone but the world’s top 2000 companies. Over time, maybe, your software helps them overwhelm the giants.
It’s not a bad play, when you’re competing against giants like IBM and Oracle, which sell big databases and analytic software to the mega corporations. Problem is, EMC is going to find competition at the bottom too — and hopes to get around that problem by picking up customers and credibility with SAS Institute.
“Most companies have yet to think of big data — business changing in real time, based on data analysis — as the next big thing,” says Scott Yara, vice president of data computing products at EMC. Greenplum, the company he founded a decade ago and sold to EMC a year ago for what looks like about $300 million, is the cornerstone of EMC’s analysis business. “High scale purpose built infrastructure for analysis will be everywhere.”
How times have changed for that guy — a year ago Greenplum was all about cheap software on virtualized x86 boxes. The first product from EMC was a $1 million appliance — admittedly, still cheap compared with the stuff from IBM or Teradata, but not exactly a blue light special.
Nice boxes like that take some selling, and Yara figures EMC has a good partner in SAS, which does a nice business selling analytics and tools (like graphics) for sales and marketing, among other things. “Personalization, ad targeting will be seen as the drivers of business revenues,” he said of the marketing push. “Companies need analytic systems to drive out bad customers and get new ones.” Not clear what a partnership like that would do to the margins at SAS, but since it is privately owned that may not matter so much.
That covers lots of medium and large companies. And the very biggest guys? “IBM and Oracle want to sell them vertical stacks, run the whole data process and have analysis on top of that,” says Yara. “EMC is going to offer something a little more open for everyone else.”
Decent argument, and in keeping with EMC’s effort to compete with HP, IBM and Oracle by partnerships (in other cases, with Cisco). Call it “open” and your liability is a strength.
Yara and SAS face even cheaper competition on the low end. Revolution Analytics, which sells corporate versions of the open source R analysis software, this week took direct aim at SAS with a “twice as fast, half the cost” challenge. Revolution’s cheap box is about $200,000 for 200 people.
Zero coincidentally, that same day EMC released an open source version of its data warehousing software, hoping to attract the kind of developers who might otherwise work on R. In house, meantime, EMC has boosted the old Greenplum headcount from 150 at acquisition to 340 now, with a target of 600 by the end of the year. That’s a lot of guys working on the technology in house — where the money still is.
ADDENDUM: Yara got back to me later. He assures me that they’d like to sell stuff to the world’s 2000 largest companies, too. That’s a good EMC employee — these guys like to compete." |
