Storage vendor, EMC, is no longer a storage hardware company if one is to believe the latest top level revenue breakdown from ANZ marketing director, Jordan Reizes. The company’s aggressive acquisition strategy has transformed it into a hybrid where software and services is becoming the dominant partner.

According to Reizes, EMC these days still gets 46% of its revenue from hardware, but 37% now comes from software and 17% from services. So EMC is now officially a software and services company he says. “When our new Australian CEO, David Webster, who joined us last September, was asked to join us, he said he didn’t want to join a hardware company,” says Reizes. “However, coming from PeopleSoft, his software expertise gives us the opportunity to grow the solutions part of the business.”

Reizes says EMC’s impressive growth from 1990 to 2000, equivalent to a multiple of 88,000, made it the number one performing stock on the New York Stock Exchange for the decade. Much of the company’s growth has been achieved through acquisition. “In the past two years we have spent US$4 billion on acquiring companies. Although, we still have a strategy of acquisition, we’re starting to pursue organic growth,” says Reizes.

“From 1991 until 2002, we were a storage company, from 2003 to 2005, we were an information management company and today we are an information infrastructure company. We’re looking for the right product mix that gives us unique value. Companies today focus on technology but our belief is that companies will in future focus on information rather than just the components of the IT stack. What’s stored is important not how it is stored. Optimising infrastructure is critical to reducing both complexity and costs. So you start to build a stack starting from the storage boxes right up to information management on top.”

The number and range of acquisitions over the past three years has pushed EMC into markets that involve competitors well outside the realm of storage. “Take Documentum, for instance,” says Reizes. “That’s a company that had nothing to do with storage; it’s information management. Last year, we acquired a small US company called Smarts, which does real-time network systems management.”

Reizes says that competitors, such as HDS, have not cottoned onto EMC’s strategy of going beyond the box. “HDS hasn’t been as aggressive as us on the information management side of things,” he says. “They have concentrated more on hardware and storage related software.”

The next frontier for EMC, according to Reizes, is the small to medium businesses. The company that no longer wants to be known as a storage vendor launched its first SMB products at the end of January aimed at businesses that have staff numbers of five up to 200. “This is all about building relationships with customers that we haven’t had relationships with before, such as small ad agencies, and it involves software rather than hardware.”