EMC Corp., which built a storage empire based on disk drives, formalized its software vision last week with the creation of the EMC Software Group.
EMC President and CEO Joe Tucci said the group, which unites the development efforts of the companys Documentum content management and Legato backup software units with its existing management software, will give customers more complete technology for managing disjointed and unstructured data.
“Were focusing around everything to do with information,” said Tucci at EMCs Analyst Day event here. “The opportunity there is just incredible.”
The software group will spearhead the addition of what the Hopkinton, Mass., company is calling Storage Aware Content Management technology into all EMC products. Planned as a suite of common services with a common management interface, the technology will let any data repository understand what type of storage devices are running beneath it. Storage Aware Content Management will also serve data protection and access recovery functions.
The new business unit will be co-led by EMC executive vice presidents David DeWalt, who formerly headed Documentum Inc., and Mark Lewis.
VMware, a server virtualization software maker that EMC acquired early this year, will not be part of the EMC Software Group. Instead, VMware will be run as a separate EMC business unit creating “virtual infrastructure” technology to power EMCs ILM (information lifecycle management) and utility computing designs.
Tim Fives, manager of Documentum applications at York International Corp., said he expected EMC to take this direction with Documentum and Legato. “Hopefully, they wont make them dependent on each other. Thats the one concern I have,” said Fives in York, Pa.
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