EMC Marries Documentum and Legato Divisions

NEW YORK—EMC Corp. told a group of analysts at an event here Thursday that its Documentum and Legato Software divisions will operate as an integrated entity alongside other EMC software offerings under the newly unveiled EMC Software Group.

The Hopkinton, Mass., storage makers new Software Group faces lofty internal expectations. Joe Tucci, EMCs president and CEO, announced at EMCs Analyst Day 2004 Conference that software license and services revenues are targeted to reach approximately $1.5 billion for the full 2004 calendar year, with a target for the full company of $8.1 billion in revenue.

“I believe its within our reach [to get] $850 million in income this year,” Tucci said. “Im telling you, this is it. Were not playing games.”

Stocked with 1,660 developers and 865 sales representatives, the EMC Software Group will be squarely focused on helping EMC solidify its ILM, or information lifecycle management, push with tangible products. The software coming from the group will help customers overcome a variety of data movement, regulatory compliance, backup, e-mail and content management hurdles, Tucci noted.

Tucci said the groundwork has already been laid to build a common management interface for Documentum and Legato across its product set backbone.

“Weve got a pretty good jump with ControlCenter. This isnt something were starting from scratch,” said Tucci.

EMC last year bought Documentum, which develops enterprise content management software, for about $1.7 billion, and it bought Legato, which makes data backup and archiving software, for about $1.3 billion.

“EMC Software Group will combine open systems and [EMC] products like ControlCenter and OpenPath, Legato, and Documentum,” said Tucci. “If we want to do more acquisitions we have a place to put it and have good synergy right away.”

The new business unit will be co-led by EMC executive vice presidents David DeWalt, who formerly headed Documentum, and Mark Lewis.

VMWare, a server virtualization software maker that EMC acquired early this year, will not be part of the EMC Software Group, according to Tucci. Instead, VMWare will be run as a separate EMC business unit creating “virtual infrastructure” technology to power EMCs ILM and utility computing designs.

“I made a commitment to [IBM CEO] Sam Palmisano and [Hewlett-Packard Co. Chairman and CEO] Carly Fiorina, who were big partners of VMWare. I said we would operate VMWare at an arms-length separate subsidiary,” Tucci said.

Next page: Advantage IBM?

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By not including VMWare in the software group, EMC is failing to keep up with IBM on the storage virtualization front, said analyst Mike Khan, of the Clipper Group Inc.

“Theres no doubt a virtualized infrastructure is an important requirement for a lot of enterprises,” said Kahn, in Wellesley, Mass. “The details tell everything. And if EMC [did not] present a lot of details, its hard to extrapolate beyond VMWare. … Time might fix things for EMC, but right now I think IBM has a completeness advantage.”

On the product front, EMC said it will add a gateway policy engine later this year. Based on Legato technology, the new policy engine will support EMCs Symmetix, Clarion, DMX and even tape products, and enable customers to move and retrieve data from whatever storage device that is important, officials said.

EMCs new software group will spearhead the inclusion of “Storage Aware Content Management” across EMCs products. Planned as a suite of common services with a common management interface, the technology will allow any data repository to understand what different types of storage devices are running beneath it. Storage Aware Content Management will also serve data protection and access recovery functions, officials said.

To help customers implement lower-cost storage area networks (SANs), EMC officials said the company plans to feature native iSCSI support and management for all its product families this year by having its storage resource management ControlCenter software tie into iSCSI.

To boost replication capabilities across greater distances, EMC will soon announce its MirrorView/A product. The new version of the product, debuting later this year, will allow for simultaneous asynchronous and synchronous connectivity between a number of sites with the same volume of data flow even if a site loses power. The technology will be available on current and future generations of EMCs DMX product line. Asynchronous capabilities for Clarion will be available in July.

Dipping into tape library waters that EMC steadfastly refused to wade into in the past, the company announced that it will resell Advanced Digital Information Corp. (ADIC) Scalar tape libraries, including the ADIC Scalar 24, Scalar 100, Scalar i2000 and Scalar 10K models with LTOP tape drives, to push its ILM portfolio.

Tim Fives, manager of Documentum applications at York International Corp., said he expected EMC to take the direction it announced on Thursday with Documentum and Legato.

“They really address the same problem,” said Fives, in York, Pa. Fives said hell be interested in seeing how EMC handles the integration of the products long-term. “Hopefully, they wont make them dependent on each other. Thats the one concern I have,” he said. Fives said the acquisition would have caused York International to take a “hard look” at standardizing on Legato and other EMC technologies. But York is instead in the process of outsourcing much of its back-end technology infrastructure to EDS, which is why Fives wants to be assured of being able to use Documentum independently of other EMC technologies.

Additional reporting by Dennis Callaghan

Editors Note: This story was updated to include more product information and user and analyst comments.

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