EMC strengthens support for third-party software

EMC enhanced its position in the information lifecycle management world last week with the latest release of its ControlCenter storage resource management product.  Here is what you can expect.

The 5.2 release features enhanced tiered storage management, strengthened support for its own CLARiiON and Centera products, and improved support for equipment from IBM, HDS and HP.  It is important to note that EMC’s support for third-party devices is further evidence of its commitment to the SMI-S standard.  While it may have taken EMC an extra bit of time to get on board the compliance train, it is now abundantly clear that the company is in it for the long haul.

The push towards interoperability shows elsewhere in this release.  Probably most obvious is the tighter integration you can now see with other companies’ systems management frameworks.  Such frameworks can now initiate ControlCenter functionality from within their own systems management interfaces.

Just as interesting is the tighter integration with BMC’s Patrol software.  EMC will use this to correlate storage assets with business processes.  This alignment with BMC management software is something EMC promised us last year when it acquired BMC’s storage assets (you may remember that occurred when BMC exited the storage management market).

To put this all in perspective, EMC now lays claim to being the world’s eighth largest software company, generating storage and data management revenue of $2.7 billion.  This is about $700 million more than rival Veritas, but still more than $1 billion shy of Computer Associates and $11 billion behind IBM. (Those last two, however, are aggregate totals that include non-storage revenue.) 

By any measure, EMC, through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions – chiefly, the purchases of Legato and Documentum – has become a software juggernaut.  Furthermore, in terms of revenue it already owns half the SRM market.

Does this mean the game is over for EMC’s competitors? No.

Right now, the market leaders when it comes to SRM revenue are EMC, Veritas, HP, Hitachi and Computer Associates, in that general order.  Note however, that these are all publicly held companies.  Privately held AppIQ (http://www.appiq.com), an OEM provider of SMI-S technology and SRM solutions to EMC, HDS, HP, Silicon Graphics, Sun and a number of other major vendors may have already stolen a march on the competition.  Operating at a number of levels, but frequently under the radar, AppIQ now has an end-user client base that extends internationally into aerospace, finance, healthcare, insurance, telecommunications and a number of other segments.