Q&A: EMC’s Joe Tucci

NEW YORK – EMC’s head honcho says that customers are clamoring for the company to do more on the security front and is trying to address those concerns with a mixture of current in-house technologies, partnerships and acquisitions. He doesn’t believe the market is ready for storage virtualization yet.

IDG News Service sat down with Tucci for a brief interview following the company’s analyst day Thursday in New York.

IDGNS: There was very little mention of storage virtualization today, bar a little talk about your Invista product. Why was that?

Tucci: Storage virtualization is very important, but the burning issue is not there. It will take time. I said I doubt that any company will make a lot of money [with storage virtualization] in 2005. I’ve been 100 percent right. It won’t be a big revenue deal until late 2006, then a very big deal in 2007. It’s like wine long before its time.

IDGNS: Would you agree with IBM that virtualization will do for storage what Linux did for servers?

Tucci: No. Are they going to give it away for free? No.

IDGNS: Looking at today’s event, one of the things to take away is EMC’s message on end-to-end security?

Tucci: Since I just bashed IBM, I’ll now give them some credit. If you look at the IBM mainframe, you don’t see a number of security products going into it. They built the mainframe with lots of security. In the open world, the industry left holes and software vendors came up and plugged them. We want to do what IBM did on the mainframe.

Sooner or later, Microsoft has got to offer full antivirus [capabilities], then there’s no market for Symantec. They have to move to another market space quickly.

Information and security go together. We need to do it and to build on it. The first trimester of the game has been won by the individual software companies. Over time, the big systems vendors like IBM and ourselves will have security in the core of their products.

IDGNS: What’s the mix likely to be of homegrown EMC existing security technology and new products?

Tucci: It’ll be things as mundane as encrypting disk drives, so you have to take it to the lab to be able to read it and when our [storage] systems dial home [to EMC], ensuring that they do so on a secure link. We’ll be looking at every single layer. VMware will have a ton of security in it. Security is one of the main issues on the [EMC] board’s mind. Customers are demanding security. It’s a mandate. We’re going to get there. We’re not as early to the party as some, but it’s still early on in the game.

IDGNS: There seemed to be some confusion among analysts today about what you’re trying to do with Storage Insight, the product based on technology you acquired when you purchased Smarts? It’s not a replacement for systems management software like OpenView?

Tucci: Tivoli and Unicenter, customers paid a lot of money to put them in. What we’re doing with Smarts is to put intelligence into those frameworks. Let them do the event collection and Smarts will do the modeling. We’re just adding Smarts to what already exists. Storage Insight can be a manager’s manager, subordinate to a framework or sometimes it can be the framework itself.

I said certainly VMware will grow more than three times as fast as our core business, Smarts will do very well too.

Storage Insight will appear at the end of this year.