emc

EMC's first quarter hits the mark

EMC today hit estimates with its first-quarter results and touted strength in its international units. Its 2011 outlook, however, was light relative to expectations.

The company reported first-quarter earnings of $477.1 million, or 21 cents a share, on revenue of $4.6 billion, up 18 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 31 cents a share, in line with Wall Street estimates.

In a statement, CEO Joe Tucci said the company will continue to focus on virtualization, cloud computing, and big data management.

Read more of "EMC first quarter in line; 2011 outlook short of estimates" … Read more

EMC acquires NetWitness, combines with RSA

EMC said today that it has acquired NetWitness, which provides network security software.

The purchase, which won't impact EMC's revenue or earnings in 2011, was closed on April 1. NetWitness will be included in EMC's RSA unit.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

With the acquisition, EMC will delve deeper into network security monitoring and analysis. NetWitness aims to spot everything from insider threats to target malware to data leakage.

On the product front, NetWitness will become part of RSA's advanced security management lineup, which includes EnVision, RSA's Data Loss Prevention Suite and CyberCrime … Read more

Think of Dell as a storage portfolio player

Last year, Dell went on a storage buying spree. Dell took in Exanet for clustered, multiplatform NAS, Ocarina Networks for extensible, cross platform data compression and deduplication, capped-off with an announced agreement to acquire Compellent's virtualized storage arrays and Fluid Data technology, which closed last month. All tallied, I estimate Dell spent nearly $1 billion last year to flesh-out its storage portfolio, which also includes its EqualLogic virtualized storage arrays and PowerVault systems.

Dell storage executives now believe they have the goods to compete head-on with the major storage players (including EMC) in the following market segments:

Virtualized disk … Read more

EMC delivers strong fourth quarter

Storage giant EMC reported strong fourth-quarter results and raised its outlook for 2011.

The company today reported earnings of $628.6 million, or 29 cents a share, on revenue of $4.9 billion, up 19 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 42 cents a share, a penny ahead of Wall Street estimates. Wall Street was looking for fourth-quarter earnings of 41 cents a share on revenue of $4.79 billion.

EMC last week launched a big push into the midmarket and is aggressively targeting NetApp. The company also plans to more aggressively market its wares. Last week's … Read more

Which 'big data' are you talking about?

Late last year I posted a blog item about big data and if/when it would present opportunities for storage vendors. I concluded by saying that, while it was a bit early for next-year prognostications, I expected to see the number of storage devices aimed at analytics applications blossom in 2011 with more storage vendors pursuing the opportunity.

It's now 2011 and I stand by that prediction. However, at least three definitions of big data have blossomed since that posting:

Big-data storage: systems that store really big (as in humongous) amounts of data Big-data analytics: systems that use new … Read more

Software groups urge probe of Novell patent sale

The Open Software Initiative and the Free Software Foundation yesterday released a joint statement, urging the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as the German Federal Cartel Office, to investigate the sale of Novell's more than 800 patents as part of its multibillion dollar sale to Attachmate in November.

In December, the OSI sent a position paper to the German Federal Cartel Office. That paper has been updated to name both software groups as the concerned parties and filed with the U.S. Department of Justice.

"Since making that filing, we have been joined by the Free … Read more

EMC targets NetApp turf with VNXe gear

EMC today rolled out its largest launch ever with 40 new storage technologies and products aimed directly at undercutting NetApp's footing.

Among EMC's announcements, the most notable item is a new family of systems called VNXe, aimed at small and midsize businesses as well as remote offices. The VNXe system prices will range from below the $10,000 mark to $40,000. The VNXe family is basically the heart of EMC's midtier storage lineup and takes the company into a niche that it couldn't hit with its Iomega unit, which sells systems in the $5,000 … Read more

Capellas-led coalition making strides by the Vblock

What's in a Vblock? It's a cloudy mix onto which a very experienced CEO is shedding more light.

Michael Capellas, the former chief executive of Compaq, MCI, and First Data, and current CEO of Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Coalition, updated industry analysts with VCE progress as of early December 2010, slightly more than a year after Cisco Systems and EMC announced the VCE joint venture, which integrates servers and networking gear from Cisco, storage and management software from EMC, and the VSphere virtual operating system of VMware into Vblocks.

While the VCE Coalition is a privately held entity … Read more

Apple, EMC, Oracle tied to Novell patent buy

One big detail that has been unclear since Attachmate's acquisition of Novell last month has been the destiny of the 882 patents that are set to be handed over to CPTN Holdings LLC--a consortium of technology companies that was organized by Microsoft.

Would Microsoft be getting all those patents, or would it have to share them with the other companies? More importantly--who are the other "technology companies" that make up the group?

While the first question remains unanswered, the second part of the equation is coming into view this morning, with blog FOSS Patents unearthing a merger filing … Read more