The latest acquisition promises to create an oligarchy of four
companies, EMC, IBM, Veritas, and Microsoft, in the storage management
software space -- five, if you want to count Computer Associates --
with lots of small fries taking little bits of the $10 to $17 billion
market, depending on which analyst you believe. The key objective of
each company is to own the "smarts" of the storage infrastructure,
having failed (in the case of EMC and IBM, at least) to gain clear
dominance in storage hardware.
For all four vendors, the game plan appears to be much the same.
Create an overarching management framework and tool suite, partner with
as many product providers as possible to contribute their API support
(e.g., to play along), and remake the world of storage in your own
image.
The vision of each vendor holds that if you deploy Storage Tank (IBM),
or AutoIS (EMC), or whatever Veritas is calling its stuff this week, or
only Microsoft operating system software, you will make your world a
better place: more storage will be able to be managed by fewer people.
The problem is that, historically, things don't work that way. In
general, customers tend to find single vendor management software
suites and frameworks to be kludgy. Often, components acquired from
third parties through acquisitions and buyouts take quite awhile to
become truly integrated with existing products. In many cases,
customers report that product suites force them to license a lot of
stuff that they don't need or for which better point product
alternatives exist in the market just to get a few products that they
want.
Interestingly, in the press accounts around the announcement, EMC
spokespersons emphasized Legato's "storage lifecycle management"
technology as a key value accrued to the vendor from the acquisition.
Indeed, the two companies had teamed for some time to come up with a
way to enable the automated identification and selection of "fixed
content" or "reference" data that needed to be moved off expensive
storage platforms and out onto EMC's long-term/seldom-referenced/must-
keep storage platform offering, Centerra. Apparently, this partnership
wasn't enough: EMC needed to own the company. (Story continues below)
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Legato backers get over a billion bucks in the deal. I can't think of
anyone who deserves it more than David Wright or David Beamer and the
others who helped bring the company back from the brink of disaster a
few years ago.
But the fundamental questions -- "Why the acquisition?" and "Why now?"
-- remain unanswered. I doubt that EMC really needed backup software
of its own to fill out its software suite. Moreover, replication and
mirroring have been a forte of the company and most of the large-scale
EMC shops I have visited seemed to have preferred disk-to-disk data
protection solutions to disk-to-tape.
EMC had some pretty good, platform-agnostic, virtual tape software a
while back and, instead of developing it as proof of its new, kinder,
gentler "Switzerland of Storage" image, sold it off to Diligent
Technologies. So Legato's tape solutions seem unlikely to be the crown
jewels that the Hopkinton crowd coveted.
Could a peripheral value of the move be that time-honored tactic of
isolating, then overwhelming, a competitor? The Legato acquisition
does seem to throw the wrench into all of the work that Legato has been
doing with Network Appliance over the past several years. The two
companies have worked together to provide back-end backup and disk
snapping solutions for NetApp filers that involved the exchange of
secret keys and codes. If Legato is now owned by EMC, such
intellectual property exchanges would seem to be at odds with EMC's
ongoing quest to beat Network Appliance at its own game in the NAS
market, a market that NetApp almost single-handedly invented.
While we are pondering that issue, ask yourself another question: What
does the potential loss of Legato mean for NetApp customers in terms of
their product support?
Change is always disruptive. It requires storage planners to consider
new angles as they determine the products and strategies they will
deploy in their own shops. Please watch this space as we continue to
puzzle out the storage management software landscape.
Related Story:
EMC Resurrects BMC Patrol: http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=2026
Original Post