EMC Q4 2009 Results Highlights
- It has returned to a modest 2% growth in revenues following three quarters of decline
- It has acquired 5 more companies since Data Domain in August
- EMC sees Cloud Computing to be about helping large organisations build private Clouds and/or purchase ‘Storage as a Service’ offerings
- VMWare sees providing Cloud Computing software components as a way of moving upward from the virtualisation and management stacks
EMC recently announced its quarterly financial results, which show a modest return to growth following three consecutive quarters of decline. EMC was not hit as hard as many suppliers in the downturn. It has used the period to acquire a number of companies to enhance its product and services portfolio – the largest of which was Data Domain. It has also been continuously developing its Cloud Computing offerings, which now contain software tools and services to build private Clouds for large organisations – to public Cloud offerings, such as storage on demand.
EMC And VMWare Continue To Acquire Companies To Enhance Services And Products
Both EMC and VMWare have been busy in acquiring companies during the downturn. I wrote about Data Domain back in August. More recent announcements include:
- On August 31st 2009 EMC announced its acquisition of the privately owned Fastscale. It has added its Composer Suite software to its Ionix portfolio, which will contribute to its Cloud implementation tools. Fastscale software helps in ‘increasing the performance and scalability of Cloud infrastructures’ primarily by putting production machines into a repository. In particular it is said to simplify application and server stack management, enabling up to three times as many virtual servers. Its processes are also claimed to reduce memory and storage requirements significantly. The purchase price of Fastscale was not announced.
- On August 10th 2009 VMWare (EMC’s virtualiation subsidiary) acquired SpringSource for $372.5 million. SpringSource is a specialist in ‘enterprise and Web application development and management’. It will add its Open source Java framework expertise, enabling VMWare to move up the stack from its long-time expertise in virtualisation software.
- On September 1st EMC announced it was purchasing Kazeon Systems, a supplier of ‘eDiscovery software provider for corporations, legal service providers, government entities and law firms’. EMC’s RCA security division has been in the business of helping large organisations with eDiscovery, which is requirement placed by the US legal system on them to be able to supply all corporate records of specific subjects when appearing in court. The price of the acquisition has not been revealed, but may have been around $100 million according to rumours.
- On January 4th 2010 EMC announced its intention to buy Archer Technologies – a supplier of ‘Governance, Risk and Compliance’ software. Archer is already a significant player in the security software and management market and will become part of EMC’s RCA security division once the deal is completed, probably in the first quarter. A is a privately owned company and the acquisition price was undisclosed.
- On January 12th 2010 VMWare announced its intention to acquire Zimbra, ‘a leading vendor of email and collaboration software’, from Yahoo. With around 55 million Open Source mail boxes Zimbra will be added to VMWare’s vSphere-based Cloud infrastructure. Again the acquisition cost was not disclosed, although Yahoo bought the company itself in the autumn of 2007 for $350 million. My assumption is that VMWare will be paying far less.
EMC And VMWare Continue To Develop Private And Public Cloud Offerings
Following the appointment of Harel Kodesh as president of EMC’s Cloud infrastructure basis in December 2008 the company has continued to make investments and announcements in this area. In particular:
- In May it introduced Cloud Storage Service and Information Management offerings
- In September it launched new EMC services and solutions for private Cloud development
- In October its RCA security division collaborated with Verisign to launch a Cloud-based 2-tier authentication product
- In November EMC and VMWare teamed up with Cisco to form a coalition to accelerate the development of private Cloud infrastructures and ‘pervasive virtualisation’
To me it appears that EMC is largely introducing new services offerings for larger enterprises, focusing on helping to build private Clouds (a bit like IBM) and its (sort of) Amazon-like ‘… as a Service’ offerings with storage elements. VMWare on the other hand is primarily using acquisitions to widen the scope of its offerings beyond virtualisation, extending its stack upward to include Cloud offerings.
Do you follow EMC and VMWare? What do you think the newly acquired companies will add to their portfolio? Let me know by commenting on this article.