EMC hungry for acquisitions

The storage company has US$9.8 billion in cash and investments and this will be used to strengthen EMC’s position in the market place, said Joe Tucci, EMC chairman and chief executive, during the firm’s annual US customer and partner event taking place in Florida.

“We will continue to invest in R&D and innovation even though we are making cuts elsewhere in the business,” Tucci said. “We will use opportunistic M&A [merger and acquisition]. We will be a consolidator,” he added.

Tucci said EMC had spent three billion dollars in 2008 purchasing companies and the company’s current budget for innovation for the year ahead would be US$7 billion, including acquisitions.

Tucci said that EMC was inclined to make acquisitions in areas where it is already strong, such as in the storage, virtualisation and security markets.

He continued the EMC did not intend to grow its presence in the server market as Cisco had done but would continue to focus on the storage infrastructure space. “We are aligned and focused only on x86 servers,” Tucci added.

He also said EMC had no plans to enter the business of building data centers, even though it was expanding its cloud offerings, such as with Atmos Online.

“We will be joining with partners to give cutomers access to data centres in Europe, although that is not to say we won’t have any data centres there at all,” Tucci concluded.