I didn’t attend, but Tony Prigmore, Tony Asaro, Brian Garrett, and Mark Bowker of ESG did. Some interesting things:
1. Dave Dewalt, ESG (not me) Pres said the two companies that keep him up at night are Oracle – because they could get into his businesses and have the muscle and customer base to make a run at it, and Google. Google shows up a LOT in answers to this kind of question – all over the IT landscape.
2. CEO/Pres/COB Joe Tucci was strikingly candid, and that’s one of the things I’ve always loved about the guy. The only other CEO’s I’ve seen as open and candid have been Dan Warmenhoven (NTAP) and John Swainson (CA). Apparently analysts were harping on Joe’s $30M pay package, which is sort of stupid since it’s all performance loaded – on the stock, which hasn’t moved in substance for a long time. If I were a shareholder, which I’m not, I’d be darned happy to pay him a truckload to move the stock value up.
I love the stupidity of it all – in the beginning of Joe’s tenure, the company was roughly $6B in revenue (and lost money) – and was pretty much a one product company. Now they are about $11B in revenue, making piles of money, have divested the product offering enormously – and the market cap of the company is about the same. This is why I don’t trade stocks.
3. Every business is kicking butt, except Legato, and there Dewalt said that the core backup business hit the number, but the ancillary businesses didn’t – things like the Xtender line and replication.
4. Tons of talk about security – finally. It will be interesting to see how EMC plays this out. They have a lot of access points to enter due to all their offerings, so putting it altogether will make for a good story. Dennis Hoffman, who is sort of the EMC security guy, is super smart. As he put it, “security is an attribute of information management”.
Hugely well attended, apparently – 4000+ EMC users. Say what you will about these guys, but they have their act together. This was a first class event from everyone I spoke too about it.
Oh, perhaps the best news from ETS was the press release where EMC basically took credit for the fact that the Red Sox won the world series…
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Steve Duplessie is the author of the “Steve’s IT Rants” blog, and the founder and Sr. Analyst of the Enterprise Strategy Group.
