EMC hits out at rivals ahead of Q2 results

Storage giant EMC has taken a few sideswipes at its rivals, claiming its acquisition and product development strategy has put it streets ahead of its competitors.

Speaking to IT Pro ahead of the publication of the firm's second quarter financial results next Tuesday, Adrian McDonald, EMC's sales and customer operations lead for EMEA, said the stock market is cooling towards tech firms.Globally, the SMB market has already moved to the cloud. "When you see that cooling effect, you start to see which companies have strength in bringing real solutions to the market," he said.

"A number of our fellow colleagues [competitors] in the market have announced and discussed different paths for the near future to EMC - [predicting] their business will be flat to negative in the near future. EMC has not made such an announcement so far."

EMC gave guidance in April that the company expected to meet and potentially exceed 10 per cent revenue growth this year.

"To my knowledge, that is something we are still focused on," he added.

According to the preliminary results, released earlier today, the vendor is on course to bank record consolidated revenues in the region of $5.3 billion, which is up 10 per cent on Q2 2011.

To achieve this, McDonald reiterated EMC's commitment to three technology areas - security, cloud and big data - which is where the majority of the firm's R&D and acquisition dollars are being directed.

"We spend north of $2 billion on R&D and, in an average year, we will spend $2 billion on acquisitions," he said.

"Over the past eight years, we believe [that level of investment] is larger than all of our competitors put together."

Cloudy forecastsA pressing concern for the company is helping more of its enterprise customers embrace cloud, in the same way the SMB market has.

"Globally, the SMB market has already moved to the cloud. If you haven't got any IT staff today, you're not going to acquire any tomorrow," he explained.

"In the enterprise, you increasingly come up against compliance issues and they genuinely can't have customer data outside their own environments for legal reasons. So, adoption has been slower."

Geographically, McDonald said the UK is leading the way in cloud adoption and is the fastest growing market in EMEA. But it still has some way to go to catch with the US.

"There are some countries in EMEA - Eastern Europe ones, in particular - where cloud is not making much of an impression right now," he said. "The Americas are the fastest adopter, and EMEA is clearly somewhat behind that."

As reported by IT Pro earlier today, EMC has also announced several senior management changes, with chief operating officer, Pat Gelsinger, set to take over the top job at virtualisation giant VMware.