EMC is still in the process of fitting together all the pieces of its information lifecycle management jigsaw puzzle, but the company is very clear on one aspect of the strategy: It has IBM in its crosshairs.

At the EMC World conference in Boston this week, the heads of both EMC's software and information security businesses -- two core pillars of its evolving ILM strategy -- both singled out IBM as the chief competition.

EMC for the past several years has been on a shopping spree of software and services companies to help it expand beyond its roots as a storage company into a one-stop-shop for storing, managing, protecting and securing data throughout the enterprise. It is currently figuring out how to integrate all of its products.

"I think EMC's biggest challenge is that they have so many offerings no one can even understand what they have, even their own people" said Bob Diamond, vice president of IT for Orange Regional Medical Center, a hospital in Orange County, New York, at the conference.

While EMC is working to tie together the companies it has already acquired, EMC President and CEO Joe Tucci made it clear that the company is not done shopping around.

"We will use some of our balance sheet assets to acquire more technologies; there are more companies we have on our hit list," Tucci said in a keynote address at the show.

Among key areas for growth, either through in-house development or acquisition, are model-based resource management, information security and virtualization, Tucci said.

At the show, EMC rolled out new resource management and information security products stemming from its acquisitions.

For resource management, EMC introduced two new offerings based on technologies it gained through its $260 million acquisition of SMARTS (System Management ARTS) in late 2004. The company rolled out EMC Smarts Storage Insight for Availability, designed to leverage EMC's ControlCenter storage-management software to monitor SAN network elements and the impact of failures on other parts of the infrastructure, such as host devices, files systems, EMC PowerPath logical paths, and EMC Celerra NAS systems. Pricing for the software starts at $750 to $1000 per terabyte.

Also new is EMC Smarts Application Discovery Manager, a 1-U Intel appliance with software that maps applications and their relationships to help users understand how application behavior affects infrastructure elements. Pricing starts at about $220,000 for 2,000 nodes.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.