Our product development efforts are geared to help our customers transform their IT environments and prepare their infrastructure for the next wave of innovation, often referred to as the Third Platform of IT.
With this in mind, EMC is making a couple of organizational moves today that will sound like “inside baseball” to most outside the company. But the benefits to customers are worth calling out, so let me do that here.
First, we are bringing together our VMAX and VNX product development teams into one division focused on enterprise and mid-range systems. We will maintain VMAX and VNX as separate product lines for different workload requirements. Offering customers a range of choices in one best-of-breed product family is a differentiator for our business. There are no changes to any products, product roadmaps or the way we take our products to market or how we support our customers. But we believe that bringing these teams together will make our portfolio and our business even stronger.
Both VMAX and VNX are block and file transactional systems that support mission critical workloads, common hardware and the use of key technologies. In the auto industry, automakers that offer different product lines for different segments of the market have demonstrated the benefits of sharing platforms, and we intend to leverage those benefits here. Bringing these teams together will allow us to accelerate innovation and maintain our leading edge in the storage industry.
Brian Gallagher, who has led our VMAX development team, will lead the combined division, while his VNX counterpart, Rich Napolitano, takes on an exciting new role leading an early stage initiative, focused on next generation information infrastructures for multi-cloud environments.
On a related note, we are bringing together our VPLEX, RecoverPoint and Backup & Recovery Systems teams into a new Data Protection & Availability Division. This combined group will enhance our value proposition around protecting, recovering and ensuring data availability, and driving data protection across — and into — our primary storage arrays. This team will better position us to deliver data protection as a set of software-defined services on top of ViPR and provide a solid foundation for ‘Trust’ in the Cloud. Guy Churchward will lead this team.
These changes are a natural evolution of our business and will come as no surprise to those who follow us closely. Over the last few years, we have continued to serve more and more customers, but there are still large untapped opportunities for us to help even more customers transform their IT environments and take advantage of the Third Platform. Today’s announcements help us align our awesome capabilities to better address the needs of customers on that journey.
