EMC's Bob Dutkowsky delves into his company's high-end storage market strategy
By Michael Vizard and David Pendery
InfoWorld Electric
EMC article in this week's InfoWorld magazine:
Bob Gauthier
Positioning itself as the Switzerland of storage in the data center, EMC has staked out a formidable position in hardware and software storage architectures. Nevertheless, the company has stated that it does not want to be all things to all people, and that it is not interested in commodity product development and direct-channel strategies. The company battles exclusively in the high touch, high end of the enterprise. Bob Dutkowsky, EMC vice president of marketing and channels, spoke with InfoWorld Executive News Editor Michael Vizard and Reporter David Pendery about storage strategies.
InfoWorld: How is EMC's storage-centric approach different from other companies that have adopted similar approaches?
Dutkowsky: [Our approach] in its simplest form says that customers want to centrally manage, protect, and share data in a platform-independent fashion, whether it's attached to a network or directly to a server. Most of the youngest players in the market still think that storage should be host-specific -- storage attaches to an MVS system, storage attaches to Unix, storage attaches to [Windows] NT. We believe that customers want one single infrastructure to manage, store, and protect their data, and all of those server platforms can attach and access that data all at the same time.
InfoWorld: Is EMC in a better position to enable access to data from different platforms than other storage companies?
Dutkowsky: There's a difference in the approach that we take vs., say, Veritas. Veritas' view is that you use the server to help manage the storage. Our view is that you use the storage device to manage the storage. It's optimized for storage, for information, and data management. And so our architecture is a radically different view of how customers want to implement an enterprisewide data management infrastructure.
InfoWorld: What are the most important emerging storage technologies?
Dutkowsky: I think Fibre Channel is an important addition to the whole storage infrastructure. Fibre [Channel] allows the attachment of servers to storage devices over a longer distance at faster speeds, and so it certainly will enable NT deployment much more aggressively in the enterprise.
Much of the value that we articulate -- customers' ability to manage, share, and protect their information centrally -- comes from the deployment of EMC software. And so I think software will also be a tremendously large breakthrough area for the customers that use that technology.
InfoWorld: Which companies are your most important allies and which are your toughest competitors?
Dutkowsky: We try to position ourselves as the Switzerland of the data center. We don't care whether it's mainframe or Unix or NT; we don't care what the application base is. We need to be a partner with the who's who of the enterprise application space. So we have allies that are software- and application-oriented, and we have allies that are hardware-oriented.
Competitors we primarily focus on [include] Hitachi, IBM, and Sun. I would say in the future we'll see much more from Compaq and Dell as they try to enter into this enterprise storage space. The biggest difference with the Compaqs and the Dells is they're going to go out and sell price. They're commodity vendors, and the whole idea that you can buy a Dell computer over the telephone is very different than our view of helping customers implement enterprise storage.
InfoWorld: Will Dell's direct model change the way storage is developed and marketed?
Dutkowsky: I think the Dell model is interesting for low-end commodity products, [but] it hasn't proven itself to work for high-end value-add kind of implementations.
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