EMC

Being bold has paid off for EMC. Despite being in a fast-commoditizing storage hardware market, the storage giant has managed to grow and lead the market in many of the segments that it competes in.

In the US$3.8 billion global standalone storage systems market in the second quarter of 2005, EMC, with US$807 million in revenue, retained its position as the top company, said IDC.

According to a Gartner study of the Asia-Pacific external disk storage market in the first half of 2005, EMC trails HP by only 1.4 percent, with 23.1 percent market share.

Showing that it is still king in the storage systems market, the vendor in September shipped a new advanced storage system, called Symmetrix DMX-3, which can store up to 288 terabytes of data on 960 disk drives, up from the 560-disk-drive-maximum of the company's previously most powerful systems.

But what is most significant has been its strategic moves outside of selling hardware.

To capitalize on the more lucrative software market, EMC acquired backup software vendor Legato Systems, server virtualization software company VMware, and enterprise content management software vendor Documentum.

The company's total revenues in fiscal year 2004 was US$8.2 billion, up from the US$6.2 billion the previous year.