Sales, service, support

EMC faces another challenge when it comes to the basic blocking and tackling of sales, service and support.

"Against their peers, they have the advantage of being focused on storage. But one area they need to move up in is the services side of the organization,'' Freed says. "IBM and HP are very established from a services standpoint. The acquisitions have expanded EMC's technology, and they have to build that out to their services organization.''

That's what Horcher is hoping for with her Documentum and VMware products. "If they assume most of the integration burden, we don't have to spend as much time developing software links between applications -- they'll do standard integration, and we can customize it further."

Brian Babineau, an analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, cautions, "Integrating all the companies and becoming more efficient at getting into new markets can be expensive at the field level, where you might need multiple offices, and that can impact business metrics.''

On the plus side, if EMC can successfully bring the new technologies into the fold and convince users that it will continue to offer the same support and technical help, it will have an opportunity to sell acquired software to satisfied existing customers.

"It will be challenging for them,'' says Kevin Westover, a systems engineer at NuSkin Enterprises, in Provo, Utah. NuSkin has invested US$10 million in EMC's Symmetrix storage platform, including TimeFinder storage replication and ControlCenter storage resource-management software.

But Westover adds that EMC is capable of rising to that challenge. "We've dealt with their software people in their professional services group when we've installed software related to Symmetrix systems. We've had good experiences with the software-support side. From what I've seen and heard, if they can somehow leverage their hardware with the software they are acquiring, integrate that and say, 'We have great hardware, and all this software works with our hardware,' they should succeed.''

EMC's Lewis hopes to lay those worries to rest. "We appreciate and understand customer concern. EMC has been very successful at acquiring technology, and it's a track record we're proud of, in terms of not only what we've done, but how we've done it. In acquisition through acquisition, some of which might be different technology than EMC's, we did need to retrain the sales force, while not breaking what we bought," Lewis says.

At Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Baltimore, EMC's support group has already proven itself. The APL implemented Rainfinity file-virtualization software just months after EMC bought the company in 2005, and EMC's support has remained strong for the new product.

"They haven't been too distracted yet by all the acquisitions. We still have contacts at Rainfinity that I can get hold of. We've had problems, and they got them done quickly. Now, Rainfinity's service number is the same as the main call center, which I was always a fan of. If you need to talk to someone, you can get them on the phone within 15 minutes," says Bill Fleming, director of infrastructure planning at APL.