EMC: What's in its shopping bag?

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: MIKE KARP ON STORAGE IN THE ENTERPRISE
10/25/05
Today's focus: EMC: What's in its shopping bag?

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* The baubles that EMC has picked up on its recent shopping
spree
* Links related to Storage in the Enterprise
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: EMC: What's in its shopping bag?

By Mike Karp

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
<http://www.networkworld.com/news/2003/1014emcoffer.html?rl>
and SMARTS
<http://www.networkworld.com/news/2004/1221emcsmarts.html?rl>
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
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage9385> (which likely will
provide a document acquisition front end to Documentum), and
several other baubles EMC has picked up along the way (
Rainfinity <http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage9386> 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.

The top 5: Today's most-read stories

1. Cisco talking IP-radio nets
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage9580>
2. School traps infected PCs in its web
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage9387nlstoragealert9431>
3. Cartoon of the Week
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage9388nlstoragealert9432>
4. Juniper gains corporate network ground
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage9581>
5. Cisco finally brings security push to LAN
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage8987nlstoragealert9434>

_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Mike Karp

Mike Karp is senior analyst with Enterprise Management
Associates, focusing on storage, storage management and the
methodology that brings these issues into the marketplace. He
has spent more than 20 years in storage, systems management and
telecommunications. Mike can be reached via e-mail
<mailto:mkarp@enterprisemanagement.com>.
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ARCHIVE LINKS

Archive of the Storage newsletter:
http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/stor/index.html Breaking
storage news and analysis:
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PLUS, see how two IT Execs are plotting their way to an all
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<http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2005/ndc5/>
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