EMC company logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
On January 29, 2013, EMC Corporation announced it fourth quarter and full year 2012 earnings. EMC’s management continues to deliver predictable repeatable profitable quarter over quarter, year over year growth amidst a challenging economic climate. While Neuralytix is not in the business of making predictions related financial performance, it is our considered opinion that EMC’s market leadership position will be unchanged throughout 2013.
That said, Neuralytix believes that 2013 will
be a transformational year for EMC, as it evolves itself from being a pure storage company into an information infrastructure company. Neuralytix believes that EMC’s stated strategic focuses outlined during its earnings presentation, it is in a great position to boost revenue from IIG and. We are excited by EMC’s explicit declaration that data-centric security and content management will be two out of the three focus areas for the EMC Information Infrastructure group during 2013.
Through this transformation, EMC’s security division, RSA, will play a decisive role in extending the idea of virtualization beyond hardware infrastructure to the virtualization and abstraction of the data itself: in essence, data virtualization. Data virtualization is the idea that each piece of data persists not in the context of a specific application, or user; but that data is a relevant to multiple applications and users for a specific context.
An example could be transaction data that was generated as a result of a purchase made by a customer. That piece of data presently only has context in the order entry system, and would have to be exported to be reused in other applications such as reporting, accounting, etc. In a virtualized data world, that piece of data would initially exist in the context of the order entry system, but the same physical data would, when given the proper security credentials be available to marketing users, reporting analytic applications, and/or accounting applications and personnel. This is the meaning behind the strategy of “data-centric security”.
With the proper “data-centric security” policies in place, data virtualization can be made possible. With data virtualized, the content of the data object can then be used for historical and predictive discovery and analytics to help enterprises gain deeper insight into its business and more specifically its customers, and enable innovation to occur that would provide the enterprise with a competitive and economic advantage.
To achieve this, Neuralytix believes that EMC needs to accelerate its education of customers: particularly customers outside the North American geographies. Some cultures that are process-centric will be reluctant to divert from the linearity of the processes in which they engage and find the dynamics of data virtualization too much to handle for the time being. In these situations, EMC’s Pivotal Initiative can demonstrate its customers the benefits and opportunities that they can gain from using Big Data analytics.
Over the last several years, EMC has enjoyed a definitive market leadership across a majority of its market segments. During 2013, EMC must concentrate on continuing its partner retention and development that enables partners to leverage EMC products in their solutions.
Also, market leadership does have its challenges. EMC faces strong competition from IBM and Oracle in particular. Start-ups will also seek to dilute the marketplace. In the face of this competition, EMC must stay true to its competencies – the wide breadth and depth of its storage solutions (from the infrastructure perspective) and its ability to extract value from the data that its storage solutions protect through its (equally) wide breadth and depth of its information solutions.
Neuralytix believes that EMC is very well positioned to maintain its leadership position throughout 2013. It also has a great opportunity to lead enterprises through the transformation from infrastructure to information with its proven and open solutions.