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EMC dishes what it will do with Data Domain

Basis of backup, recovery and archive division

Data Domain, which has today announced its top-end DD880 product, will become the foundation of a new backup, recovery and archive division inside EMC.

EMC has announced it now controls Data Domain's destiny. Data Domain stockholders have tendered approximately 78.2 per cent of the outstanding Data Domain shares (not including shares tendered by notice of guaranteed delivery).

Together with the 3.9 per cent of outstanding Data Domain shares previously held by EMC, EMC now controls approximately 82.1 per cent of Data Domain shares outstanding. Closure is expected by the end of July.

The new division will be headed by current Data Domain president and CEO Frank Slootman. He'll report to Frank Hauck, the exec VP head of EMC's storage business, and also to Joe Tucci, EMC's chairman, president and CEO. We don't know why there are two reporting lines.

EMC will increase its investment in the division, adding resources, technologies, and products. This suggests that EMC's existing backup and archive products, both hardware and software, will be put into Frank Slootman's pot, and he has the joyful job of rationalising them.

The set of products Slootman could own is huge. It would be expected to include Avamar, the Disk Library hardware, the one with Quantum DXI deduplication software technology, and Legato Networker. Other backup products in EMC's stable include RecoverPoint replication, Data Protection Advisor, HomeBase for server recoveries and migrations across dissimilar hardware, and MozyPro, which is currently, we understand, in the Decho organisation.

Existing EMC archival products include Centera, DiskXtender, and SourceOne. EMC classes the RainFinity File Management Appliance as an archive product. There are also the Documentum Archive Services for Imaging, for Reports, for SAP and for SharePoint.

EMC hasn't actually listed the products Slootman will own. If Slootman gets all or most of them he's got a significant learning curve ahead of him. EMC expects Slootman's new division to grow revenue at significant double-digit rates and achieve $1bn in revenue next year.

Tucci talked of EMC and Data Domain together shaping "the future of next-generation disk-based backup, recovery and archive solutions, making life significantly better for our joint customers, changing the game in the storage software market, and creating new market opportunities for growth".

Slootman, getting over his divorce from NetApp, said: "We envision great opportunity to accelerate our business through EMC's massive worldwide distribution network and customer base, and we can't wait to begin seeing that play out in the marketplace." Neither can we. ®

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