EMC's Tucci: New IBM, HP Products Not 'Game-Changers'

EMC CEO Joe Tucci Tuesday said the company has not felt the heat from the recent storage platform product introductions by rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

After EMC posted quarterly results in line with Wall Street expectations, Tucci said the recent product refreshes from the competition are not taking a toll on EMC. "These products are pretty much as we expected and offer logical extensions in terms of performance and capacity with respect to their product families," said a confident Tucci. "They are not game-changing products.

"We have a healthy lead in the all-important area of functionality," Tucci added. "The best news is that EMC has a faster cycle of innovation. We now know what our competitors have. We still have not played our next round of platform cards. In short, we are comfortable with our competitive positioning."

Tucci said EMC has not seen a longer sales cycle in the wake of IBM's high-end storage product line announcements. He expects the IBM introductions to have no impact on EMC in the fourth quarter. "The high end is not where customers play around," he said.

As for the midtier competition with HP, Tucci said EMC is not seeing any significant impact from HP's recent move to hire more storage salespeople. Tucci maintained that EMC is gaining share from HP. "We're doing OK [in the midrange]," Tucci said, adding that besides HP, EMC competes heavily with IBM and Network Appliance in that segment.