At its recent mega conference in Las Vegas EMC was confident enough to play around and poke fun at itself and the industry.

The company made a huge set of announcements around scale out, availability and performance. It was almost refreshing that it did not push a power management message. But we suspect that this won’t last.

When we caught up with Pat Gelsinger, President and COO of EMC Information Infrastructure Products, we raised the subject of power profiles for its products and he told us the company’s concentration on orchestration, software tools, data management and analytics all had an impact on power use.

Gelsinger said: “It is not that it is not an issue but it is not at the top of the list with respect to our customers. It might be with efficiency of orchestration that I’m helping them or with big data management and that’s got a much more significant challenge for us. When you go to total management level, it does get to be an issue because you are worrying about power profiles across the whole data center.

“When you go to Vblocks (The VCE’s rack-based converged infrastructure range – VCE is a Cisco/EMC joint venture) it is a bigger issue because those guys are delivering the compute side piece also,”  he said.

When asked, BJ Jenkins, President of the Back Up and Recovery division at EMC – which sells a lot of ‘big fat SATA drives’ – said power management was an input but not a primary input in the conversation with customers. He said the primary migration benefits from ditching tape outweighed any power considerations.

The EMC World conference theme was ‘Stortrek, Transform and Prosper’ with senior execs happy to play various roles including Star Ship captains or Elvis impersonators on comeback tours. When growing up, it appears that those at the top of EMC wanted to be either Captain Kirk or Elvis.

DIVERSE AND INTEGRATED

EMC is a US$20bn storage, information management, security and virtualization company. The company emerged from the mainframe storage world and through a series of strategic acquisitions, developments and appointments has manoeuvred itself into a position of dominance in some sectors, market leadership in others and ‘what the hell is it doing there’ in others.

It bought VMware – which contributes $3.76bn in revenue. It bought RSA Security, which contributes $828m. Its Information Intelligence division was a $700m business in 2011 though ‘product revenues declined 18.5% to $219.5m in 2011’, according to the annual report.

The $14.7bn remaining comes from inside the Information Storage division. Within this sits Isilon, a NAS (network attached storage) firm which has its own hardware range known as the X series and its own management platform which EMC bought in 2010.

In the back up and recovery space it bought Data Domain. (“Deduplication will continue

to be a big buzz word for the foreseeable future,” says BJ Jenkins.) The products include Avamar, which got a functionality boost. Data Domain and Avamar exited 2011 with a $2bn run rate.

Greenplum is a data analytics firm bought in July 2010. And latterly it bought XtremeIO,

an Israeli flash storage hardware maker. It ‘demo’d’ the functions of an XtremeIO box

at EMC World. Also on the hardware front EMC is a major stakeholder in VCE, its joint venture with Cisco with VMware and Intel (as equity stakeholders). VCE manufactures the VBlock. (A $800m business at the end of 2011 which has a $1bn run rate, says chairman Michael Capellas.)

During the conference itself – which took place from May 20th to 24th – the firm bought Syncplicity, a cloud-based synch and share file management provider.

Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC, said the company would continue to invest 11% of revenue in R&D annually and $2.5bn to acquire companies – a combined investment of $4.5bn.
 

Where will that money be invested? On the acquisition front, who knows? But EMC loves big data, big data analytics and it totally loves the Cloud. At first glance the list of acquisitions above looks like a smorgasbord of storage hardware manufacturing, security, virtualization and data management. But if one sets out to break down the company it looks weirdly coherent and the firm has proved to be good at integrating its acquisitions.