Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

DATA-STORAGE FIRMS DIVIDED OVER SHARING COMPUTER CODES

Complaining about the squabbling among major data storage vendors, R.R. Donnelley & Sons storage administrator Mohammed Ali said, "I feel something is lacking here, which is that the customer isn't high on the list of their priorities."

For an industry whose players agree they must co-operate to prosper, there was plenty of sniping at a data-storage trade show here yesterday.

Joseph Tucci, chief executive of Hopkinton-based EMC Corp, said it is "stupid" that some other data-storage companies aren't yet sharing their computer codes to operate within the same computer networks. EMC's archrival, Hewlett-Packard, snapped back that EMC won't share enough of its own code while it promotes proprietary, closed standards.

In an interview, EMC's Tucci described changes he has made to the way that EMC pays its sales force, a major cultural shift for the company as it tries to foster closer ties with resellers like Dell Computer Corp.

Executives from both firms stated similar goals for the new software products they introduced yesterday, all meant to support the emerging software industry standard known as "Bluefin."

Hard Hit by the Slowdown

In theory, Bluefin will allow one company's data-storage hardware to operate on a network controlled by software from another provider.

The model has eluded many customers to date, however, and yesterday's conference drew several hundred corporate managers and information specialists curious about designing their networks to account more cooperating within the struggling data-storage industry. Once among the most lucrative technology areas, storage has been hard hit by the slowdown in technology spending, and EMC and its rivals have been emphasizing higher-margin software products in response.

According to a poll of the audience taken yesterday by conference sponsor SearchStorage.com, 68 percent of the managers said they expect their 2003 budget will increase, while just 12 percent expected it to decline.

Smooth Interoperator

Some customers doubted whether storage systems would interoperate smoothly soon, however. Conference attendee Mohammed Ali, a storage administrator for R.R. Donnelley & Sons Corp, said he expects at least another two years of squabbling among the major vendors before their products become simple to use together.

"I feel something is lacking here, which is that the customer isn't high on the list of their priorities," said Ali, who added that he buys equipment from most major vendors.

All worry they could give away too much code, however, Ali said. The result is more rhetoric than useful products based on swaps of code known as "application programming interfaces."

"All these [software] tools are supposed to make my life easier, and yet I still feel I'm playing catch-up," Ali said.

'Open' Is Very Important

To convince the crowd that better times lie ahead, EMC and Hewlett-Packard sent their top executives and introduced new software packages each said would make it easier to copy, transfer, and access millions of pages of computerized records.

Hewlett-Packard's offering builds on code developed by Compaq Computer Corp, which it recently purchased, and the company maintains major facilities in Shrewsbury and elsewhere in Massachusetts dedicated to storage. One reason for the software's capabilities, bragged company vice-president for storage Howard Elias, is that Hewlett-Packard has the most code-sharing agreements of any of the major hardware makers, including deals with IBM Corp and Hitachi Data Systems.

Although Hewlett-Packard and EMC also agreed to share code with each other, Elias said that when it comes to open standards in general, EMC's "track record on that is very clear, they've not been supportive."

Nonsense, replied EMC's Tucci in his own remarks. "The word open is very important to us," he said. EMC yesterday introduced eight of its own software products it said would mesh well even with equipment made by companies like IBM and Hitachi, with whom it doesn't share code officially, through reverse-engineering and other technical methods.

Cultural Changes

In an interview yesterday in between sessions, Tucci also described some of the cultural changes he has made to EMC's sales force compensation structure in an effort to make EMC more cooperative with its new sales-channel partners like Dell Computer Corp and Unisys.

Previously, EMC sales representatives were paid on almost every deal they helped arrange. But since 2001 the company has established stronger boundaries around just which customers each salesperson will be paid to sell to, Tucci said.

Sales employees "are each given a playlist and told to maximize revenue and customer satisfaction," he said. But say if it was [a sale] to an account that we don't have coverage on and our sales rep. got involved, they wouldn't be compensated," he said.

No Spinoff for Crown Jewels

The goal is to leave room for channel partners to make sales to smaller data-storage buyers, like hospitals and schools, Tucci said. "If you're going to have channels, you have to say, 'here's the territory for you." And that's why, in the past, EMC hasn't had a strong sales channel in place."

Tucci wouldn't provide details about a potential software spinoff involving some of its Israeli-based assets, but said "that's the concept we're looking at." He said such a deal wouldn't indicate any deeper break-ups for EMC's software operations, however, as others in the industry have suggested.

"We're talking about spinning off a couple of pieces of technology, but not spinning off software or the crown jewels" of the company like its WideSky software initiative, Tucci said. "These are no-revenue or low-revenue types of products" that are being considered to be set up as separate units or to be sold, he said.