The storage management industry has been stunned at EMC Corp.’s recent buying spree.
Last month it announced a US$1.7 billion stock purchase of Documentum Inc., a leader in enterprise content management software, just as it finalized the US$1.3 billion purchase of Legato Systems, a backup software
specialist.
Some resellers are stunned, too.
“”We can’t figure out if its good or bad yet,”” said Leo Binkowski, a document management specialist at Sound Foundation, an Ottawa consultancy Documentum integrator.
While he thinks the deal is a good idea, he points out a problem: “”I haven’t seen any bundling arrangement (with EMC products) or any direction.””
But he and other Documentum resellers will have to wait until early next year, when the deal is finalized, to find out how they fit into EMC’s plans. The company said it expects Documentum to operate as a separate division, as is Legato. But details won’t be disclosed for several months.
Documentum resellers in Canada are mainly consulting giants such as IBM, Deloitte and Touche, Cap Gemini and Accenture.
Meanwhile Legato resellers, who have been waiting since July when the proposed purchase was announced and are only now beginning to see their future.
Last month talks began between EMC and Legato here about leveraging each other’s channel programs, said Rob Stroud, EMC Canada’s partner manager.
“”I don’t have an integrated strategy I can roll out to the partners,”” he acknowledged in an interview. “”We’re at the beginning of those discussions.””
However EMC has promised to create a “”deal desk”” to avoid problems with sales to common customers. It wants to keep channel sales of all products neutral — Legato resellers won’t be pushed to sell EMC products — although there will be speciality sales teams.
EMC, which largely sells direct, has more than a dozen resellers in Canada, the company said, a number it is trying to increase. Recently it negotiated distribution deals with Bell Microproducts and Mississauga, Ont.’s Skydata Corp.
Legato sells mainly though a handful of VARs here.
“”We’re keeping every product from Legato,”” said Michael Gallant, EMC’s director of global public relations in an interview.
“”Over time you’re going to see more joint solutions that will be rolled out to the channel,”” he added.
“”As these solutions are bundled we would hope over time to see more Legato resellers be interested in signing up with EMC’s program. But it’s important to understand they will be kept separate.””
While Stroud hopes to sign up half of Legato’s resellers here to carry EMC products, a Lachine, Que., reseller of the product was saying au revoir.
“”We’re a partner of Hitachi Data Systems,”” explained Jerry Preziuso, vice-president of sales and marketing at MasStor Technologies Inc. “”We have to look at the alternatives because of the competitive nature of EMC and Hitachi.””
In addition, it does a lot of business with Sun Microsystems, which also includes Legato in some offerings. So MasStor is sticking with Hitachi, dropping Legato and adding software from CommVault Systems Inc. as its storage management software of choice.
Nor is DigiDyne Inc., a Montreal-based integrator which will continue to be a Legato partner, interested in becoming an EMC hardware reseller. “”For the time being their products don’t fit into our plan,”” said Albert Poole, DigiDyne’s director of support and professional services.
“”We were told EMC intends to run Legato independently, and if that’s the case we feel very good about it.””
EMC’s buying spree is aimed at lifting it from a hardware vendor to a storage software provider. The software it sold until now was proprietary to its Symmetrix and Clariion lines. But Legato’s software is open architecture, letting EMC now sell applications to users of other manufacturer’s hardware. Documentum would put EMC into a new market, content management.
At the same time EMC’s resources could give Documentum and Legato resellers more clout against storage competitors such as Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM.
Industry analysts see these moves as broadening EMC’s software line into an end-to-end solution grandly called information lifecycle management —the control of data from creation to archive.
“”They’re reshaping and re-forming the storage industry,”” said David Hill, vice-president of storage research at the Boston-based Aberdeen Group, said of the EMC deals.
“”EMC has correctly identified that a large percentage of storage is fixed content, file-based rather than database-based”” — such as e-mail, PowerPoints and videos, he said. That information has to be tagged on creation, so it can be stored in the most appropriate places and managed for regulatory compliance. Documentum is an application that has metadata-tagging ability.
In Canada, EMC stands fourth among disk storage vendors, behind HP, IBM and Dell (which sells EMC’s mid-sized Clariion line storage units). But the recent acquisitions may not push it higher says Alan Freedman, research manager for infrastructure hardware at IDC Canada.
“”I don’t think that’s their goal,”” he added. “”They want to be more ingrained in the whole storage play, not just hardware.””
