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

To: Gus who wrote (13754)	1/17/2002 8:11:15 AM
From: Jerome	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17183

Gus...many thanks for your reply. As you see it is the recovery in the storage market a near term thing , or is it better to assume that 2003 will be upswing year. Capellas did say one interesting thing on his TV interview yesterday. He said that high end bullet proof equipment was most in demand since 9-11. Would this also be playing into the strengths of EMC? The high end stuff has better margins and could put EMC into the black quicker. Regards, Jerome

To: Gus who wrote (13754)	1/17/2002 5:30:15 PM
From: VFD	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

Gus, I just received an e-mail from a friend about EMC and IBM. As usual she does not include a link (I have asked her to do so many times) so I do not know where this "rumor" comes from. Maybe you want to comment on it. EMC 'Wishes' for IBM How much do the news gods love us? We were eagerly awaiting the arrival of EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC - message board) executives at our New York office, for an interview scheduled months ago, and two blocks away, Wall Street is buzzing with rumors that IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM - message board) is about to sign a "major" deal with the storage giant. What gives? The word on the Street is that EMC is about to announce a partnership with IBM around its AutoIS and WideSky software initiatives (see EMC Automates, EMC Goes Soft), and EMC Splits Into Three). Launched in October, AutoIS is EMC's umbrella marketing jargon for future applications from the company that will make storage management "automated, simple, and open." WideSky, the middleware component of AutoIS, is its invitation to other storage vendors in the market to link into this software through API (application programming interface) swaps. As a result, EMC plans to be the all-encompassing storage management software platform capable of managing heterogeneous storage environments. So far, however, Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE: CPQ - message board) is the only major company to have signed up (see EMC, Compaq Swap APIs). Consequently, EMC officials "wish" the IBM rumor were true. "This would be great and logical for our mutual customers," says Ken Steinhardt, director of technology analysis at EMC. "But unfortunately, IBM is trashing us publicly." Referring to the relentless rumor that the two are in acquisitions talks, Wall Streeters says IBM would be "very unlikely" to buy a big company while in the process of changing CEOs (see Will IBM Acquire EMC?). Most believe a partnership between the two firms is more likely in the near term. Explaining why such a deal makes sense, Laura Conigliaro, an analyst with Goldman Sachs & Co., says, "IBM has three main businesses -- Unix servers, storage, and middleware -- and it's weakest in storage." Getting support for its AutoIS and WideSky initiatives, (nicknamed "Pie-in-the-Sky" by its competitors) is critical for EMC as it attempts to offset the industry decline in hardware pricing with software sales (see EMC Bombs Big-Time ). "AutoIS has the potential to get EMC back into its installed base of customers and sell more products outside of a hardware sale, pushing up its gross margins," says Dan Renouard, analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co. Inc. Policy-based storage services -- possibly the hottest area of the market right now -- is something EMC intends to address though AutoIS. The idea with policy-based services is to have intelligent software automatically provision capacity to certain applications or users, depending on a set of priorities predetermined by the administrator. This is a laborious manual task today. EMC seems to be on the path to this process with its StorageScope software, which it started shipping in December, and the company claims it is seeing traction with it. But it only goes part of the way. StorageScope enables administrators to allocate capacity by geography and department but still requires manual intervention. "Discussions at the highest level are happening around just this subject," says Steinhardt. "The question is to what degree we do [automation] and which products and platforms we integrate with." EMC could probably learn a thing of two from the wealth of startups out there addressing storage automation -- InterSAN Inc., Invio Software Inc., and NuView are all gunning for this market.