As chairman and chief executive of storage giant EMC, Joe Tucci heads a company which employs 37,000 people at 400 offices in nearly 70 countries.

Tucci is responsible for overseeing EMC’s present and future direction, a daunting task for a company that reported record annual revenue of $13.2bn (£6.7bn) for fiscal year 2007, up 19 per cent on 2006, and with profit up 43 per cent to $1.7bn (£900m).

When he first joined EMC in 2000, 77 per cent of the company’s revenue came from sales of storage hardware. Eight years on, Tucci has overseen a significant change in the sales mix. In 2007, only 43 per cent of EMC’s revenue came from hardware. Software accounted for 41 per cent, and services for the remaining 16 per cent.

“When I started, the split was way too unbalanced, and we needed to build up the software and services portion of the revenue,” says Tucci. “At this juncture, all three pieces of the business are showing double-digit growth, but software and services are growing faster and most of EMC’s acquisitions are in those segments. The ratios will change a bit, but we do not have a specific goal.”

However, Tucci does have firm targets in mind when it comes to EMC’s product strategy. Environmentally-friendly storage, more efficient data encryption, cloud computing and Web 2.0 are all on the agenda.

This year, EMC will introduce hard-drive spin-down ­ a disk-based power-saving technology that keeps hard drives idle until they are needed ­ into all of its storage arrays.

Tucci is also looking at ways to roll out flash storage ­- which cuts down on power consumption by replacing spinning disks with solid-state memory -­ across EMC’s product line. The potential of solar-powered hard disks is also under investigation.
“It’s both a vendor push and a consumer pull,” he says. “Customers are clearly telling us it is expensive to build datacentres and that they are concerned about energy costs.

“There is a lot of technology that helps with greener storage ­ data deduplication, thin provisioning, tiering ­ but bigger hard drives are just not energy-efficient from an ergonomic perspective.

“There is a price premium for flash storage right now, but it offers significantly better performance and reliability, and better energy usage. There will also be different types of flash memory over time, which will affect the price.”

The encryption of stored data also plays an important role in EMC’s thinking
after its acquisition in 2006 of security specialist RSA for $2.1bn (£1.1bn).

At present, the company encrypts data using software that runs on servers, but that is set to change. EMC plans to integrate data encryption tools in the storage controller, but only once processors become powerful enough for data encryption not to slow down input/output (I/O) operations.

“There will always be a tremendous number of different points that you will encrypt, whether at the application, database, network or storage array level,” says Tucci.

“Right now, EMC encrypts data in server software that manages storage pipes between storage devices and servers. In two years we will build that into the storage controller itself, once there is enough power in the processor cores, which will make it seamless to turn on.

“We will charge for robust key management and really make a business out
of that, but over time it will just become another feature that the customer turns on or off, and we probably won’t even charge for it.”

Like other large IT vendors, EMC has always sought to expand its business by buying up successful companies such as RSA, and 2008 has already been a busy year for the storage giant.

The latest acquisition of consumer storage company Iomega for $213m (£110m) seems like a digression for a vendor that has previously focused solely on delivering large-scale data storage products for the corporate market.

But Tucci says that, alongside EMC’s services division, Iomega is central to its push into the cloud computing arena.

“We see a lot of storage needs in individuals’ homes, where master copies of information need to be protected and secured,” he says. “We believe datacentre storage products will be used for intensive I/O and transactional processing, but Iomega products in the home will help to build up the cloud where individuals will collect the information.

“The cloud is a very interesting space for EMC. We have not played in the Web 2.0 area before, or too much in consumer, but there are obvious opportunities for us in how information is stored, protected and managed. It is a major play for us in the future.”

Another key issue is server virtualisation. EMC’s VMware subsidiary is making healthy profits, despite having Microsoft breathing down its neck. The software giant is about to release the final version of its Hyper-V hypervisor and virtual server management product, and has existing VMware customers squarely in its sights.

“I think worry is the wrong word,” says Tucci. “You do not create a market as
sizeable as server virtualisation has become without competition; it would never happen. But VMware is by no means sacrosanct.

“What I need to do as chairman of VMware is to make sure that it has a first-rate management team and continues to exploit its advantage.

“VMware has been doing server virtualisation for many years, whereas Microsoft is only on release one. Microsoft will expand the size of the market ­ that is good ­ but VMware just has to outplay Microsoft, use its lead and do more things on the virtualisation front.”

As EMC continues to move forward and attempts to align its product strategy to meet anticipated customer demand, Tucci is under no illusions about his company’s greatest asset: its staff.

“The key thing to being successful as a manager is to get really good people, then get them working together as a team; nothing is more important than that,” he says. “Assembling them is hard, but it is no good unless you get them to row in the same way and embrace a single strategy or set of related strategies.”

Tucci is a strong believer in leading by example, and that all managers must be a mirror for their own staff.

“Whatever you want people to do, do it yourself,” he says. “If you want them to work long hours, you work long hours.

“You need to manage through the highs and the lows. When things are going great, keep your feet firmly planted on the ground and do not get too excited, and do not get down during the tough patches. It takes a lot of self-discipline to do that.”

Despite his hectic travel schedule and commitment to EMC, Tucci stresses the importance of relaxation in staying on top of the job.

“My wife would say I do not relax, but I love to spend my personal time sailing, swimming or scuba diving, or just sitting on a deck overlooking the water. When I’m doing those things, or going down a mountain on skis, I’m not thinking about doing other work-related things,” he says.

Despite a career in the IT industry of almost 40 years, technology was not necessarily Tucci’s first choice.

“When I was in school, there were two areas that seemed to offer a degree of future for me: financial services and IT. At the time the financial services industry was in one of its slumps, so IT looked more attractive,” he says.

After graduating in 1970, Tucci spent some time playing baseball, driving a van and working as a lifeguard before starting work as a programmer for RCA. He was assigned to develop applications around what used to be the New York phone directory.

He wrote routines in assembly code that used random and sequential index access on 16MB disk drives within systems that had just 256KB of memory, a far cry from the sort of processing and storage capacity that EMC systems offer today.

His greatest success

When asked to name the project he is most proud of implementing, Tucci singles out the transformation of EMC from a hardware company focusing on high-end storage to a business that makes 57 per cent of its revenue from selling software and services to small firms and large corporates alike.

“The way EMC has diversified its revenue base in terms of software and services is what I am probably most proud of,” he says. “Even though the company has broadened its focus, it has still kept its purpose at its centre.

“EMC is not all things to all people. The addition of security and availability software, management tools and virtualisation technology means it is grappling with a much bigger pie than before, but it kind of makes sense that it is not into doing
applications, chips or broad services.”

But Tucci suspects most people regard his greatest achievement as overseeing EMC’s acquisition of privately-held startup VMware from under the nose of Microsoft for $635m in 2003.

Under EMC, VMware’s net income for the financial year 2007 was $218m (£111m), compared with $86m (£44m) in 2006. Sales revenue for the year totalled $1.33bn (£680m), an 88 per cent increase on 2006.

“Obviously, the VMware acquisition will probably go down as the crowning achievement,” says Tucci.

“I certainly thought it would be good for the company, but it was actually
pointed out to me by a couple of EMC customers. I had not really heard of the technology, but they said they were using it on EMC storage arrays and that they would like EMC to support it.”