EMC Corporation at Credit Suisse 2007 Annual Technology Conference - Final.

Original Source: FD (FAIR DISCLOSURE) WIRE

ROB SEMPLE, ANALYST, CREDIT SUISSE: Well, good morning. My name is Rob Semple. I am the IT hardware analyst here at Credit Suisse. We are pleased to have Howard Elias from EMC. Howard is the President of Global Services and Resource Management and Software at EMC. In addition to that in his time at EMC, he has been involved in M&A, incubation of private companies, product marketing, so he brings a nice perspective to the table here. We would, again, like to thank you for being here Howard. Maybe we could just kind of start off with what is new at EMC.

HOWARD ELIAS, PRESIDENT, GLOBAL SERVICES, RESOURCE MANAGEMENT & SOFTWARE, EMC CORPORATION: Yes, I appreciate that. Well, good morning, everyone. So EMC has, as many of you know, continued to transform our business and we really talk about our role in IT now as the information infrastructure provider. Think about it really as having a storage-centric strategy for many, many years now moving to information-centric. So we have always stored information and now storing information is just one of the things that we do and we do quite well.

Frankly, still over half of our R&D investments go into our platform and software business for enterprise storage, but in addition to storing information, we now protect it, we secure it, we help optimize and leverage that information with our content management businesses, virtualize with VMware in our storage technologies and what we have seen is customers have continued to see phenomenal growth in their information. Over the last decade, it has averaged 60% per year. We do not see that changing.

But on top of that, the needs of our customers have grown from just managing that information to compliance, regulatory, repurposing that information and really finding a way to optimize that information infrastructure. So that is really where we have been focused.

ROB SEMPLE: I am going to have to just hit on this of front and then we'll get into more of the EMC stuff, but a big theme at this conference, there's a lot of concerns about the economy, where we are headed. A sentiment survey earlier in the week thinks, at least some of the people in the room, think we may be headed to a recession.

On your conference call, you guys delivered good numbers. Joe Tucci did mention that financial services was a little soft, still grew. Can you kind of just give us your most up-to-date thoughts on kind of the demand environment and the economy as you see it?

HOWARD ELIAS: Yes, at this point, Rob, unfortunately, I won't be able to comment further and have nothing really additional to add other than what Job has said on that conference call.

ROB SEMPLE: Okay. Well, then how about I take it this way. If we -- you have obviously been in storage for a while. You have also been in the hardware industry for a while. If things start to pull back from a spending perspective, given some of the discussion about where utilization rates are in the industry and things of that nature, where do you think storage falls on kind of the priority list for near-term or even prolonged cutbacks relative to maybe other categories -- servers, PCs, etc.?

HOWARD ELIAS: That is probably a good way to look at it and if you go back to that growth number of 60% per annum in terms of capacity growth over the past literally 10 or 12 years, it has been relatively constant in what I would call the good years. It got as high as 100%, but even in the years after 2000 and 2001, the lowest it actually went to was 40% growth. So information continues to grow in the economy and especially with new types of information. It is no longer just a database world. Unstructured data, rich media, the social networking and so on.

Another interesting change that we have seen, which is just going to drive even more of this, is, in the past, most information was actually created by businesses, managed by …