<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, storage]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, storage]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/storage http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/storage <![CDATA[EMC reports sales up, but customers dragging heels]]> Joe TucciStorage is a predictable need; have you ever heard anyone say they need less of it? That has long been EMC's pitch to Wall Street — that demand for its storage hardware and software is ever reliable. The earnings news from the company is mixed: Customers are still buying, with revenues up 17 percent to $3.5 billion, but buyers in the U.S. are taking longer to make up their minds and sign purchase orders. Rational caution, or a sign of trouble ahead? EMC CEO Joe Tucci, in a conference call, acknowledged that the environment was "tough," but stood by his earlier forecasts. If EMC's customers continue their delaying tactics, they may prove Tucci overconfident. At some point, his salespeople will bow on price to seal deals and make their quotas. Storage may be a necessity, but EMC's profit margins, which rose to 15.8 percent in the quarter, are not.

]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=383286&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[EMC gets cozy with Mozy, but will consumers bite?]]> The problem with selling your wares to Fortune 500 companies? There are only 500 of them. And the high-priced, hard-charging sales force required to woo them is prone to scandal, as a recent sex-bias lawsuit against EMC alleges. That, I believes, explains why the storage-hardware maker is getting into the consumer business with its $76 million purchase of Mozy, an online data-backup service. With only 180,000 customers, the purchase price seems high, as GigaOm and others have noted. But small businesses are often better courted with consumer-friendly offerings than with hard-sell pitchmen.

Mozy, with online-backup plans starting at $4.95 a month, opens up EMC to businesses that would never bother to buy their own servers. And Mozy itself, as it adds hardware to cope with growing demand, makes a fine in-house buyer of EMC hardware. That's the business logic, anyway. In practice, there's a flood of online-storage startups on the market, and EMC may find the consumer business tough sledding. That makes me think of a less rational, but emotionally satisfying, explanation for EMC's Mozy buy: Boring enterprise businesses like EMC have a bad case of Google envy, and want to tap the consumer market to salve executives' ego and perhaps boost their market cap.

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