While its competitors are aiming squarely at the small and medium business market, EMC is drilling down even further by focusing in on the growing governance segment of the market.
According to Kevin Quinlan, the director of content management and archive group for both EMC Canada and EMC Software, the company’s latest versions of EmailXtender and DiskXtender for Windows are solutions that goes across the SMB and enterprise spaces. The products are able to meet audit, analysis and electronic discovery demands along with backup and recovery.
The situation with corporate governance has intensified in the past few years with compliance laws such as C-198, Sarbanes Oxley and PIPEDA. “Archiving software for file management helps customers meet internal and external governance requirements. E-mail is a record of business, whether you use it for communications with customers or contracts or products or HR matters or for brokerage. It is a record of business and securing it is now part of the landscape,” Quinlan said.
Governance fits into EMC’s larger strategy of life cycle management and resonates with Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint portal services. It also will work with Lotus Domino and Notes, Quinlan said.
Spending on governance is projected to be huge. IDC figures indicated that in 2005 the total market for governance was $2.7 billion in North America and expected to grow to $7 billion by 2010.
He added that for the channel, governance is also a matter of protecting the customer because compliance laws are forcing customers to manage information better. Quinlan claims EmailXtender gives a flexible approach to e-mail archiving and monitoring, while DiskXtender enables customers to search single files systems or a collection of storage indexes for electronic delivery.
These products will be sold widely through EMC’s channel partners in Canada from the enterprise down to the commercial and mid-market spaces.
“What we see from our channel is partners looking for an additional angle to help sell into the governance market place,” Quinlan said.
Quinlan would not speak to margins of both Xtender products, but did say that they tie into storage infrastructure, so resellers are able to combine software and implementation services along with hardware such as Centra to boost margins. “Clearly customers are moving off tape and storing information on disk so there is an area to develop revenue for the channel with these products,” he said.
Quinlan said with these products there will be savings on storage, and through the elimination of duplication and there will be some productivity gains with the new search tool for repositories.
However, the real impact will be when a company is rescued from a legal discovery perspective. The products can set up legal case matter into a folder for example.
“Mitigating legal risk is a broad statement. Whether it is from the SEC or SOX or the financial community, companies have to be in compliance. It is not a matter of choice but of how they can efficiently store that information and manage it through a life cycle and produce it,” Quinlan said.
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