While watching last night’s episode of Covert Affairs I spotted VMAX light strips reflected in a closing glass door.
Not usually one to mistake minor details like that (Just like Gil Grissom I also like rollercoaster's) I freeze framed it, sure enough the glass in the background was picking up a reflection of a VMAX door. A couple of minutes later when Piper Perabo and Christopher Gorham walk into the CIA lab there’s this...
VMAX isn’t only showing up on TV, from today’s earnings announcement it appears to be transferring market share away from it’s competitors in the high end and the high end of the mid-tier through consolidation. 32% year over year revenue growth on top of the growth from last quarter. What with a System z refresh due this week I’d expect more customers turning to VMAX’s scale out design to meet their needs.
Mid-Tier.
As we’ve been telling customers for months now and have been showing them behind closed doors at EMC World, there’s a new product family coming next year.
I know what it looks like, I know when it’s out. It won’t be available this year we’ll talk about what it looks like when it is available.
Clariion isn’t going away, Celerra isn’t going away. Sales of each increased last quarter and the code for both of those products had a major upgrade announced at EMC World and will be delivered this quarter.
This will be...something new.
vBlock.
Sales are well ahead of plan. Demand for meetings about vBlock were so high that at one stage I was talking to CxOs about the Journey to Private Cloud. (Don’t tell my boss) Hiring the right people is crucial for it’s success going forward and explains why EMC is bringing onboard as many smart people from different specialities as it can find to staff up that organisation.
BRS.
Moving like a rocket. I’m sitting in the nose cone of that rocket so I’ll choose my words with care but BRS is a Billion Dollar volume business for EMC. Not a Billion Dollar business, a Billion Dollar Volume Business. I’ve been in competitor stronghold accounts who wouldn't take a meeting with EMC previously but they're buying BRS products.
Hiring.
Joe said R&D are being too slow in hiring extra heads as they’re too picky. Well, you can’t be too picky about smart people. I was sitting at a table of new hires a few months ago and the question came up where did you work previously? I was the only person at the table who hadn’t been writing code for Sun or Oracle. When I asked them what they had worked on my brain induced a coma to protect me from the depths of kernel development.
Acquisitions.
EMC is sitting on the economic firepower to buy a Symantec or the like. It won’t. Big acquisitions are how companies choke to death but it could do so it if it chose to.
Right now the list of people and technologies I’d like EMC to bring in house is pretty short. I had been pushing hard for Greenplum only to find that was nearing completion by the time I started making real noise.
We might need a new crop of start ups to appear in order to bulk that list up.
Overall?
A strong quarter, blew past expectations by about $40M, new products in the pipeline, enhancements for existing ones (Array based encryption with RSA Key Manager), and hiring as many smart engineers as EMC can get it’s hands on.
Now back to Q3…