 |
 |
"The competition in Hong Kong's IT sector is the hottest I have seen in my twenty years of experience," said Gabriel Leung, general manager for Hong Kong, EMC. "The market is very mature, and vendors are more advanced than they were 10 or 15 years ago."
But Leung, whose firm garnered three awards this year, isn't fazed. "We respect our competitors, because they help push us to the next level. When there's no one in front of you, you've got to watch your back!"
Support and services
Leung said that because of this mature market, Hong Kong tech vendors are no longer seen as simple box-sellers. "Customers have more choices nowadays," he said, "and a lot of that is due to vendor-education. End-users expect support and service, and that's a development that's good for Hong Kong."
The EMC chief added that service and software now represent about 54% of EMC's overall revenues. "In the last few years, we've made several key acquisitions," he said. "And these have all contributed to what we call our 'Total Customer Experience' or TCE. We brand them all under EMC, so they get the same level of support as all of our products."
"We have to invest to ensure a high quality of service," said Leung. He also pointed out that strategic acquisitions can help stave off possible IP struggles further down the line. |
|
Six minutes per year
On winning the awards, Leung said he felt EMC's reputation contributed significantly. "The reason your readers picked us is not purely due to product and technology, but also due to the overall feeling they have towards EMC. We offer quality of service and support across our full product spectrum-we're not purely a hardware vendor, but a solution-provider for information infrastructure."
"For our enterprise-class products," he said, "our spec is six minutes of downtime per year. This is the type of quality you want to rely on when you put your mission-critical data on any system."
"Almost 90 % of our staff are engineers," said Leung. "We only have about 10 % sales staff."
M&A
As for mergers and acquisitions, Leung said that if appropriate new opportunities came their way, the company would invest. "After all," he pointed out, "acquiring a company means you own their technologies, and there won't be any disputes on this point. It can be cheaper to spend money on buying a company rather than spending it on lawyers!"
In the last few years, EMC acquired companies as diverse as RSA, VMWare, Legardo, and Documentum.
R&D and the China factor
"While Hong Kong plays a critical role in the region, and IT utilization is among the highest in the world" said Leung, "we don't have much R&D going on here." One reason, he suggested, is that China is supplying much of the R&D for the region. "We have an R&D center in Shanghai," said Leung, "and plan to open another one in Beijing."
The Shanghai R&D facility (see sidebar: "Setting up in Shanghai") opened in June of 2006. At present, EMC says they have 140 employees in Hong Kong and 500 in Guangzhou, plus 135 in the Shanghai R&D center. The updated plan is to add two new R&D centers and employ 1,000 people in regional datacenters by 2008.
EMC also plans to open four offices in Shenyang, Xian, Nanjing and Wuhan this year and to increase the number to 20 mainland offices within five years.
The EMC playbook
When asked how his firm managed to integrate all the acquisitions of recent years, Leung pulled out a thick notebook. "This is the roadmap: our 'playbook' of best practices," he said. "This is how we aggregate value-we have 126 'plays' in here that detail how to implement best practices across our entire product line."
Leung said that this aggregated knowledge helped keep all EMC's regional operations on the same page, in their drive to maintain brand-perception.
Setting up in Shanghai
In July of 2006, EMC opened a development center in Shanghai and announced plans to invest US$500 million in China over the next five years. The center is part of EMC's global research and development investment. In China, EMC has established a comprehensive China Solutions Center network, deepened its relationships with key Chinese customers, created partnerships with software and systems integration solution providers, opened training centers to certify networked storage specialists, and made significant contributions to the academic community in China, said the firm in a statement.
"We at EMC are deeply committed to China for the long term, said Joe Tucci, EMC's chairman, president and CEO. "We plan to more than double our current investment in China."
According to an IDC report (Asia/Pacific Semiannual Storage Software Tracker, 2H 2005), EMC is the #1 storage software vendor in the PRC, capturing 39% of the country's storage software revenue in 2005. Last year, EMC's overall software revenues ranked the company seventh among the world's largest enterprise software providers, said the firm.
EMC's Shanghai-based development center aims to provide support and ongoing development across the company's portfolio of software and play a role in accelerating the localization of EMC products for China and other Asian markets. The center is expected to employ approximately 100 developers by year-end and grow to 500 by the end of 2008.
Dr Chenggong Charles Fan, EMC's VP and GM of the company's China-based development, will lead the center's development activities. A native of China with a doctorate in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Fan reports to Mark Lewis, EMC's EVP and chief development officer.
EMC in China
The firm entered the Chinese market in 1996 and today operates major sales offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu. EMC's current investments in China include the EMC China Solution Center network-with five centers in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Taipei-that support and demonstrate EMC's technologies for customers and partners; the "EMC Classroom" at Tsinghua University; the EMC-Fudan Network Storage Training Center in Shanghai; a strong development partnership with Neusoft; and 35 service centers across the country.
In addition to leading the storage software market, sales of EMC storage systems also led China's External Disk Storage market last year. 2005 revenues from EMC external disk storage systems represented 21.8% of the total External Disk Storage market, according to IDC Asia/Pacific's Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, Q1 2006.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
