However, analysts pressed company executives on the extent to which there is channel conflict between Dell and EMC. Some believe that as Dell expands its storage business, it will start grabbing away customers. Tucci addressed the issue frankly: "Occasionally, Kevin [Rollins, Dell's president and COO] will have to step in when a guy gets out of line... but this is a very, very strong partnership."
With Dell's help, EMC says it sold every single Symmetrix DMX 3000 and 2000 system it had in stock, ending the quarter with some backlog. "Like the Yankees/Red Sox series, it was completely sold out," EMC CFO Bill Teuber said on the call.
And EMC's Symmetrix evidently stole some market share away from IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM). In its earnings announcement yesterday, Big Blue said sales of its Shark storage system were down 12 percent sequentially after having lost share "against a key competitor in the high end."
But even as it's executing on its hardware strategy, EMC is also continuing to aggressively build out its software portfolio. Earlier this week, EMC announced plans to acquire content management vendor Documentum Inc. in a deal worth around $1.7 billion. That deal would vault EMC into becoming one of the largest software providers in the industry (see EMC Swings Into Software Big Leagues and EMC Cops Documentum).
Tucci touched on the Documentum deal, explaining that unstructured data is one of the biggest areas of growth. "Every leader in every market does two things -- increase the size of that market and make the pie bigger, and take a bigger slice of the pie," he said. "We're doing both... I've never gotten more excited about any opportunity in my 33-year career than I have about the opportunity we have with Documentum." [Ed. note: It seems like every quarter, Joe finds something new that he has never been more excited about.]
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
