'We are always looking for acquisition'– Chris Gahagan

What is the current focus for your India operations?

Our India operations have grown considerably and we are quite
pleased with this. In the month of January this year we announced that we are
going to double the 20 member team at Bangalore within one year. But due to
vibrancy in the mar-ket, we have exceeded the 50-digit number as of now and we
would be increasing this multi fold as we are focusing on India as a major
source for our development.

At present, there is a core team of about 20 software pro-fessionals
working on state of the art storage solution that is at least two years ahead of
its times. So it is this kind of futuri-stic development that is taking place at
our Bangalore facility.

As of now we have about 9,000 sq ft of space but as we
expand, we will be moving out to a new facility very soon. There is a lot of
work going on at Bangalore on the Visual SAN line of product and as we move
forward the center will see a lot of activity in terms of new pro-ducts.
Considerable part of our $ 100 million will go into this R&D facility at
Bangalore.

Why do you think that acquisition is the right way to
securing intellect for the company on the long run?

Over the past three years we have acquired 10 companies
including one from India. All our acquisitions add value to the overall strategy
of the com-pany, which is to provide inte-lligent storage solutions. As storage
evolves, this intellige-nce is coming from the soft-ware, so major portion of
our acquisition come from the software arena and rest part is from hardware.

With the help of acquisition we try to bring in different
val-ues and product lines to our portfolio. This gives us dual benefits of
increasing the over-all intellect for the company as well as working with new
clients in different niche areas. However, it is not only acqui-sition that we
bet on. We have a strong policy towards R&D. In fact, for the last year we
spent more than $ 800 million only on R&D activity. This is much more than
what our closest competition spends on an average. To strengthen our R&D
focus, we have spent more than $ 2 billion in the development and construction
of an interoperatibility lab in the US. We are simulating different kind of
customer environments in this lab and it is quite necessary for the success of a
product.

Why has managing infor-mation suddenly become such a
hot area? Where is the storage business headed?

It is been long since we have seen that storage needs the
combination of strong infor-mation management skills and that is what we are
doing. Org-anizations across the world have realized that beside stan-dalone
storage there is a need for strong information mana-gement tools. This has been
a challenge for almost all the organizations managing their storage needs and
information lifecycle management meets this challenge directly and dyn-amically
by enabling a custo-mer to manage

information based on its changing value to the business over
time. It means mapping the value of information and the resources to manage it
to meet the busi-ness goals–all at the right time. So moving forward we
definitely see that there would be a strong focus on infor-mation management.

Beside, there is a certain need to convert the unstru-ctured
data into the structured format in the market and that’s where our recent
acquisition of Documentum is important. As of now over 60 percent of data is
unstructured and all this is going to be converted into the structured format by
various means and Documentum is all set to tap this niche market segment.

Information lifecycle mana-gement (ILM) seems to be
drawing lot of attention these days with almost all the storage players coming
up with their version of the solution. How is EMC placed in this space?

ILM is a platform to manage information and storage is a part
of that. In fact our acquisi-tion of Legato–which had more than 31,000
customers worldwide, 500 customer fac-ing staff and over 400 part-ners–has
considerably helped us create a space for ourselves in this segment.

ILM is doing pretty well in the market as of now and our
channel partners in India — HCL, Wipro, Tata Elxci have done a great job in
terms of increasing the market reach. We will con-tinue to explore new partners
in this part of the world. We also have global alliances with Dell and Datacraft
for the implementation of our products.

What is happening on the acquisition front for the
company as of now? Any new plans to acquire storage focused companies in this
region?

We are always looking up for the inorganic growth. As of now
we are in the process of completing our acquisition of Documentum. We initiated
the process in the month of October 2003 and we will be completing the
proceedings by the end of first quarter for the next year.

EMC has done quite well in terms of revenues–we are
expecting to garner about $ 6 billion for the financial year 2003.

(CyberMedia News Service)