EMC: Dell Needs Storage Specialist 3PAR More Than H-P

August 27, 2010

EMC President Pat Gelsinger weighs in on Dell and H-P's fight to buy data-storage company 3PAR

For EMC President Pat Gelsinger, HP would be able to better monetize the acquisition of storage company 3PAR than Dell because of its current strong position in the high-end enterprise market.

“Clearly they [HP] have a position in the enterprise. They should be able to sell that [3PAR]. But there are always integration issues,” explains Gelsinger. “I think HP has a better position to monetise it because of their stronger position higher in the enterprise. So if you look to who will get more value out of the 3PAR acquisition, I think HP is in better position. But that makes all that important for Dell.”

Despite the strong Dell/EMC partnership, Dell largely don’t have a product at that level, adds Gelsinger.

“So they have to extend their sales capabilities higher in the enterprise to be effective with it. It certainly makes it A fun sport to watch the competition. With HP’s board to prove that they are still active and can move forward despite their CEO.”

And from an EMC perspective, Dell would actually be a much better suitor.

“I would prefer 3PAR not being on HP’s hands because I think they can actually compete with us. They have a salesforce that could sell it,” confides the EMC executive.

If HP ends up acquiring 3PAR, it will certainly hurt its partnership with Hitachi – which currently supplies HP with high-end storage products. On the other hand, with or without 3PAR, EMC is commited to the Dell relationship.

“I certainly prefer that they [Dell] didn’t add this [3PAR] to the complexity of the mix. But wether they do it or not we’re going to be great partners with Dell,” adds Gelsinger.


M&A Shoot Out Seen For The Datacenter

March 23, 2009

Three broad-shouldered tech titan have their sites on the datacenter.

They all have plenty of money in their pockets. And they all have plenty of desire to capitalize on the big changes coming to way corporations manage and store the tons of digital data they create.

Cisco, IBM and H-P have the datacenter in their sights

Cisco, IBM and H-P have the datacenter in their sights

So it is not hard to imagine a coming acquisitions binge as they try to out-position each other.

The heated battle went public last week when Cisco Systems announced its data center strategy and the introduced a blade server, taking it directly into the path of IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Cisco, more so, raised $4 billion in February, which analysts believe it will use for mergers and buyouts to supplement the partnerships it is forging to strengthen its product portfolio.

It may not  be alone. IBM is said to be considering an acquisition of Sun Microsystems, with its tape storage and other datacenter businesses.

Meanwhile, H-P last year acquired integration and consulting firm EDS, dramatically increasing its capabilities in corporate technology services.

So, which companies are most likely on the block? According to UBS analyst Nikos Theodosopoulos, possible candidates include Juniper Networks, Brocade Communications Systems, Netapp,, Accenture, EMC, VMware and BMC Software.

Cisco could easily be the most aggressive.

However, “we view the convergence of storage and networking in the data center as at least two years away,” says Theodosopoulos, with the recession “the lack of confidence on unified standards pushing out this market.”


Employees Crown Netflix As Best Tech Workplace

December 30, 2008
Career site Glassdoor turned to employees to choose their top best places to work

Career site Glassdoor turned to employees to choose their top best places to work

Netflix, Adobe, Google, SAP, NetApp and Intuit have the best workplace in the tech sector, according to a survey conducted by career site Glassdoor.com for its first annual Employees’ Choice Awards for Best Places to Work.

Out of the 15 tech companies that made Glassdoor’s top 50 list, 9 are from Silicon Valley and 3 – Citrix, EMC and SAP – have large corporate offices in the region.

WholeFoods has a better work environment than Google!

The Top 50 winners – General Mills topped the list – were selected from more than 11,000 companies reviewed by the nearly 75,000 employees who completed a 20-question survey on Glassdoor.com in 2008.

To be eligible for the list, a company must have had at least all of the following as of December 15, 2008:

  1. 25 reviews from United States-based employees,
  2. “satisfied” ratings overall and across all categories, and
  3. a CEO with at least a 50% approval rating.

Interestingly, tech giants like AMD, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle (Salesforce.com is #47), Symantec didn’t make the list.


VMware To Be The Plumber Of Enterprise Cloud Computing; Sees Clouds Becoming Information Custodians!

November 12, 2008
Paul Moritz, CEO of VMware

Paul Moritz, CEO of VMware

At the Web 2.0 Summit last week, VMware CEO outlined his interest in cloud computing.

Moritz said that one of VMware’s mission is enabling businesses that have a huge investment in existing applications to be able to take advantage of the cloud in the future.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company is interested in supplying the underlying plumbing that will enable companies to become more cloud-like in their internal operations and in doing so start to leverage external clouds.

“That means they have to be able to abstract away those applications from the current underlying infrastructure and get to a position where they have the option to be able to slide those applications into the clouds of the future,” Moritz said.

Clouds will become the custodians of all our information; outlasting applications and devices.

Moritz also talked about was how the clouds would become sort of an information bank, a custodian that will hold, protect and give access to all the information we would have created in our lives; creating a new type of body called the independent information provider that will store that information and mash it up with additional information over our information and so doing, adding value to the information

Sounds really far fetch! This idea of an information bank probably originates from Moritz 5 years experience in running his personal information management start-up Pi that was acquired last February by storage company EMC, the parent of VMware.


Video: Iomega CEO Chalk Talk on Competition, Opportunities in Consumer Storage Market

September 25, 2008

This video is an excerpt of the presentation Jonathan Huberman gave yesterday at the EMC Summit in Silicon Valley where he talked about the challenges differentiating in the external disk drive market where all the solutions look very much alike.

The Iomega CEO also talked about its competition (Seagate, Western Digital, Buffalo…), the network storage opportunity as well as the company’s new multimedia drives. Huberman also touched on the SSD opportunity. For more details on what Huberman said yo can also read this previous post.


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