EMC may confuse customers with acquisitions, says HP

published 10 July 2009

EMC is "at risk of confusing customers" following yet another acquisition, according to a manager at HP.

In a meeting with IT PRO, Adam Thew, business unit manager of the Storage Works Division at HP, discussed EMC's acquisition of Data Domain, which saw it end a long-run bidding war with NetApp.

He said: "What are EMC up to? If I was a customer talking to EMC who have acquired four technologies in the past few years to address the same problem of de-duplication, how would I know this latest solution was right?"

"You are at risk of confusing customers if you chop and change to provide de-duplication and are already on your fourth technology."

Thew also criticised the company by claiming it put all of its customer's storage onto tier one, rather than tiering it properly.

He said: "The company put all its customer's storage onto tier one but by tiering that data properly you can save 30 per cent in the physical footprint [utilisation of the storage]. There are too many customers spending too much on storage and I am a happy man if they can cut costs."

De-duplication is a very hot topic in the backup and storage industries with research from Storage Expo predicting 27 per cent of companies will start using it this year and companies like Acronis making it the selling point of its products.

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.