Business

Saturday October 24, 2009

EMC branches out

By LEONG HUNG YEE


KUALA LUMPUR: Virtualisation and cloud computing are among the markets that US-based EMC Corp is keen on.

Vice-chairman William J. Teuber, Jr said while data storage had been its biggest revenue contributor with about 75%, the group decided to branch out.

“We didn’t just do storage. We decided to branch out to where customers are,” he said on the sidelines of the Forbes Global CEO Conference 2009 recently.

He said virtualisation and cloud computing were designed to make corporate data centres more efficient by enabling computer servers to run and process many tasks at once.

Teuber said cloud computing would be a very “significant” trend going forward and the adoption would also translate into savings for some organisations.

However, the savings would very much depend on how much was being virtualised.

“It could be as much as 30% in terms of infrastructure and about 60% of operating expenditure,” he said.

He added that apart from savings, these solutions also helped enterprises in “maximising and harnessing” their equipment to perform faster and was also “green”.

While he did not reveal the investment cost for the adoption of such solutions, Teuber said it would be less expensive if enterprises were to mix their data solutions.

EMC, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, recently introduced the new V-Max technology. The response had been very encouraging and tremendous, Teuber said.

He said the group had seen strong adoption of Flash with the new V-Max.

He said during the dotcom bubble in 2001, the group had to terminate the services of a significant number of its employees. “The worldwide recession has hit us as well. We had achieved 21 straight quarters of double-digit growth but were affected last year,” Teuber said.

However, he said the group had performed well in comparison to its competitors.

“We’ve performed very well and we are well positioned in the market,” Teuber said, adding that EMC was financially strong and had a solid financial base. However, he declined to disclose any figures.

Teuber said the group had also embarked on a group-wide cost-saving initiatives to save US$350mil and was on track to achieve it. However, it maintained its research and development budget.

Locally, its Malaysian business unit, EMC Computer Systems (M) Sdn Bhd, grew and strengthened its leadership position in the FC SAN and iSCi external storage markets in Malaysia.

According to the IDC Asia Pacific quarterly disk storage systems tracker March 2009 report, EMC expanded its market share in the total external storage for 2008.

The IDC report indicated that although the total market for external storage in Malaysia declined to US$48.15mil in 2008, EMC managed to grow its market share to 23.84% at the expense of its two closest competitors.

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