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

To: JDN who wrote (3388)	12/15/1998 9:55:00 AM
From: bob gauthier	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

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.

To: JDN who wrote (3388)	12/15/1998 9:57:00 AM
From: bob gauthier	Respond to of 17183

DLJ initiates coverage of EMC as 'top pick': Bob Gauthier Coverage Initiated Company Symbol Brokerage Firm » Initial Recommendation: More -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BindView Developmnt BVEW CIBC Oppenheimer » Buy History Bombay Co BBA Wheat First Union » Buy - BroadVision BVSN Friedman Billings » Accumulate History Champ Auto Racing MPH CIBC Oppenheimer » Hold History EMC Corp EMC DLJ » Top Pick History

To: JDN who wrote (3388)	12/16/1998 1:57:00 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

Very true, JDN. In the ultra-conservative glass houses, reliability and service may ultimately be EMC's ace cards. Aside from being a steadily recurring revenue stream, services are also valuable selling points that can mean the difference between closing a deal or not. At the end of the day, all these technology gizmos have to sell. Each sale gets added up on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly bases. And we slice and dice these numbers to tell us if sales are slowing down, plateauing or accelerating. Each sale comes with a pitch. The basic EMC pitch is very unique and tough to beat. And it starts with this... We are EMC. We sell indestructible storage that will work with your old, legacy mainframe/servers/computers and whatever computing paradigm you want to use in the future. Because we only sell indestructible storage, we will never sell you a processor upgrade cycle that you don't need As EMC's numbers show, anybody who sells a processor upgrade cycle alongside the storage upgrade cycle can't match this pitch. Sun claims that they sell 80-90% of every storage subsystem sold with Starfire. EMC claims they get 50%. Company propaganda vs company propaganda. I'm inclined to go with EMC's claim not only because they were the first to do this but also because Sun's PR has over the years earned an 80% discount rate with me. After all, and setting Linux, Java, Jini and Symbian aside, just how fast and how far can a revolution a minute company like Sun go when they don't have the bond that a single platform like Wintel has developed with its users or the bond that a platform-independent company like EMC has developed with the most conservative and most lucrative market in IT -- a market where IBM, which used to own this market, is the preferred non-EMC source? That's why as the frequency of these EMC-killer type of announcements increase in 1999, the year of Fibre Channel, I'm going to reduce each one to the basic sale. It's tough to beat EMC's basic pitch.