* The baubles that EMC has picked up on its recent shopping spree
EMC is making plans to go beyond its traditional niche market of storage. Admittedly, that “niche” is a mile wide and almost as deep, but in order to remain competitive in large enterprise IT – EMC’s traditional market – the company will have to be able to look beyond to include an enterprise’s networks, servers, applications and security. That is what HP, IBM, and Sun – EMC’s major competitors – are doing.
And so, EMC has been acquiring technology. Some folks still think that buying a company in order to get a quick toehold in the market is a mistake, but it really is quite the opposite. It is merely an example of the realization that some companies do things better than others, and in many cases it is likely to cost you less to buy a company than to build a technology. Economists refer to this as competitive advantage; those of us who have participated in failed R&D efforts recognize it as a repudiation of the NIH (“Not Invented Here”) syndrome that so often is a driving force at engineering-run companies.
EMC’s purchase of Documentum and SMARTS last year offer plenty of evidence that EMC is looking beyond its traditional strength. As do last week’s acquisition of document management software maker Captiva Software (which likely will provide a document acquisition front end to Documentum), and several other baubles EMC has picked up along the way (Rainfinity certainly stands out among these).
The SMARTS purchase was particularly important, however, as EMC is looking to the SMARTS InCharge software to give it an ability to look out across the enterprise and monitor – and eventually manage – with some appropriate level of granularity.
InCharge is definitely still a work in progress and will clearly continue to be so for a long time to come. But then, what isn’t? What’s more important is that InCharge is also a work that holds lots of interesting technology. The software looks across the connections within a data center, interprets data, and provides root-cause and impact analysis. For gathering data, it relies on “adapters” to provide it with information about the various elements it looks at. These adapters sit between the SMARTS software and the elements being managed (voice over IP and DSL are examples of such elements – in the case of storage, EMC’s ControlCenter management framework is the adapter).
If this sounds to you like the architecture that is used in the Knowledge Modules that go with BMC’s patrol software, go to the head of the class. We’ll look at this a bit more next time.
