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Technology Stocks : EMC How high can it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: adsorb who wrote (10536)	6/22/2000 1:48:00 PM
From: Gus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17183

EMC CEO Ruettgers takes stock of storage market By Sonia R. Lelii eWEEK MONTEREY, Calif. -- EMC Corp. CEO Mike Ruettgers hauled out his crystal ball Thursday morning and made some heady predictions about the state of the storage business over the next three years. In a keynote address here at the Network Storage 2000 conference, Ruettgers said that by 2003 all mission-critical backup and restoration of data will be done on disk rather than tape. Moreover, disks will no longer be sold with servers. The typical "global 2000" business, Ruettgers predicted, will have more than a petabyte of online data by that time. And within two years, one major server vendor (whom he declined to name) will abandon its storage business because of a lack of storage expertise. Shifting gears, Ruettgers said the biggest danger facing EMC isn't the growing number of storage competitors but the alarming shortage of IT professionals. It is expected that 1,700,000 IT jobs will go unfulfilled worldwide over the next few years, he said. "At EMC, we have 20,000 employees and we have 10 percent turnover. We still need to hire 6,000 people," he said. "It is hiring people and getting them productive that is the big problem. The most dangerous thing for us ... is the ability to get people." What's driving the storage business? Ruettgers reiterated the now-common wisdom that storage is the foundation of all business. Among the drivers of storage are the familiar Internet applications -- data warehousing, Windows NT implementations, e-commerce and ERP applications. He identified some emerging drivers as well, such as optical networking, the wireless boom, the genome gold rush and the dawning realization that all data is becoming mission critical. "The growing importance of what this industry does cannot be underestimated," Ruettgers said. "Storage is becoming more and more key to what we do." EMC recently surveyed 800 companies in 15 countries, asking them what they consider first when building a new system. Forty percent listed storage first, while 20 percent listed networking and 25 percent listed applications. Twelve percent listed servers. "Today, everything that revolves around servers is, in fact, gone," Ruettgers said. "Servers are simply not what the world revolves around." Ruettgers also reiterated his belief in the demise of tape. The technology, he said, is not a good solution for backing up and restoring data. It takes over a year and a half to recover a petabyte of data from tape. Asked at one point what EMC tells its customers is a better solution for backup, Ruettgers replied there is none. "That is an area that is wide open right now," he said. "I don't think there is a good solution for us today. If someone has a solution, I'd love to hear about it because our customers need it. I'd love to work with them on it." zdii.com