EMC Helps the Polk Company Drive Down Costs and Increase Revenues
Leading Marketing Information Services Provider Also Leverages EMC Enterprise Storage to Eliminate Backup Windows, Improve Uptime
HOPKINTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 2, 1998-- EMC Corporation, the world's leading provider of enterprise storage systems, software and services, announced today that The Polk Company, a leading provider of marketing information services and database management, has acquired seven terabytes of EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage and several EMC software solutions to speed the creation of new services and improve availability of its mission-critical data warehouses.
''Consolidating our open systems data onto EMC Enterprise Storage substantially cuts back the time it takes to create new applications,'' said Joe Kovach, Chief Information Officer for The Polk Company. ''Because storage management issues become virtually transparent, our application builders can spend more time developing and refining the services that help increase revenue and profit for our company.''
''A centralized pool of EMC storage significantly simplifies storage administration and reduces the overall cost of managing our information,'' added Kovach. ''Our data warehouses are so large that we can't afford to duplicate them and have unnecessary redundant stores across different servers. Having all of this data in one place also makes it much more accessible to our employees and customers.''
Dave Zaccagnini, Polk's Vice President, Information Technology, commented, ''A major challenge is hiring and training people to support and manage the exponential growth of our open systems environment. A common information storage approach based on EMC means training costs go down, productivity goes up, and revenue-generating projects are completed more rapidly.''
New Information Protection Strategy Eliminates Backup Windows
The Polk Company, based in Detroit, will implement EMC TimeFinder software to create point-in-time copies from a critical database while in production. Using TimeFinder, Polk can directly back up and restore its large Oracle databases in real-time. Not only will this off-load heavy traffic off the network, but it will completely eliminate costly, unproductive backup windows and associated downtime.
EMC also is addressing the need for Polk's information to be available for longer periods of time. In a batch environment, it would take eight hours to complete a tape-to-tape backup of one of Polk's largest databases -- which holds 220 million names.
''Once that information is being accessed by people in real-time, it would be inconceivable to take that database down for backups,'' Zaccagnini observed. ''With EMC TimeFinder software, we can freeze a copy of the database and still have it available to our customers. This increased availability of information translates into higher customer satisfaction and ultimately greater revenue potential.''
Including the latest EMC purchase, Polk now has nearly 11 terabytes -- the equivalent of 2.7 billion pages of text -- of EMC mainframe and open storage. EMC Symmetrix systems provide high-performance storage to a Sun Ultra Enterprise 10000 server running large Oracle-based data warehouses and an IBM mainframe handling Polk's data compilation applications. Polk utilizes EMC Fibre Channel technology to provide high-speed connections between the Symmetrix systems and its server and mainframe platforms.
''Polk is a premier example of a company whose customer satisfaction is directly linked to timely, continuous access to information,'' explained Bob Dutkowsky, EMC's Executive Vice President of Markets and Channels. ''EMC Enterprise Storage offers companies like Polk the ability to keep their systems running day and night, making it easier for them to do business with their customers. The common information protection, sharing, and management provided by EMC Enterprise Storage lower the costs of managing this information and maximize its value by dispersing it throughout the enterprise.''
About EMC and Polk
EMC Corporation, a Fortune 500 company based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, is the world's technology and market leader in the rapidly growing market for intelligent enterprise storage systems, software and services. The company's products store, retrieve, manage, protect and share information from all major computing environments, including UNIX, Windows NT and mainframe platforms. The company has offices worldwide, trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EMC, and is a component of the S&P 500 Index. For further information about EMC and its storage solutions, EMC's corporate Web site can be accessed at emc.com.
Polk provides multi-dimensional intelligence information solutions to companies as a statistician for the motor vehicle industry; as a direct-marketing resource; as a supplier of demographic and lifestyle data and database-marketing services; as a publisher of city directories; and as a data enabler for geographic information systems. Based in Southfield, Mich., Polk is a privately held firm with facilities around the world, including the United States, Canada, England, Germany, and Costa Rica.
EMC and Symmetrix are registered trademarks and EMC Enterprise Storage is a trademark of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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Contact:
EMC Corporation
David Farmer, 508-435-1000 (Ext. 77206)
farmer_dave@emc.com
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