EMC now sells more software than hardware, but sees itself as an 'information' company

EMC now sells more software than it does hardware, it said at this weeks EMC Momentum user conference.

Mark Lewis, EMC content management and archiving division president, said that when he first joined EMC in 2002, it was an 87 per cent hardware company but now EMC is between 56 and 57 per cent software. “But the hardware base did not shrink in that time,” Lewis said. "The quick growth in software been because of acquisitions", he added.

Since 2003, EMC has made investments in: Documentum (content management), Ask Once (federated search), Acartus (reports management) Captive (imaging), Authentica (information rights management), ProActivity (business process management), and X-Hive (XML management business).

EMC is seeing a large growth in software in the Middle East and Russia, said the firm, because of the relative maturity in the software market in those areas, Lewis said. But EMC said it sees both hardware and software as a “means to an end,” and wants to be seen primarily as an information company, said Lewis. “We are a technology company focussed on building the information infrastructure,” he explained.

“We do not have targets anymore on the relationships between hardware and software, and the reason we don’t is that we don’t view ourselves as a hardware company or software company,” said Lewis.

EMC announced its plans to focus more on analytics products in its aim to define itself as this information company. Whitney Tidmarsh, content management and archiving marketing president, said “we will continue to build up the analytics products acquired in content analytics and classification technologies, and we will enrich these over the years”.

EMC will also continue to partner with analytics vendors, said Tidmarsh. “You will continue to see us invest in analytics as a strategic area of growth, and we will look at a combination of tactics and techniques there to organically grow what we already have and to partner and potentially make acquisitions,” she added.

Tidmarsh suggested the different types of analytics EMC will invest in. “The most interesting part is content analytics that help us understand more about the information and better drive information to user needs,” Tidmarsh said. “There is also process analytics that will help us reach a point where processes can be dynamic and self-optimising,” Tidmarsh added.