WARY of competitors chomping in to its new-found software revenue, computer storage heavyweight EMC is fast converting its products to the software as a service-style delivery.

Speaking at the EMC World event in Boston this week, EMC Software president Dave DeWalt said the first EMC products capable of being bought as an online service, as well as in the traditional shrink-wrapped form, would be available in "a couple of quarters".

EMC was in the process giving its software the multi-tenanting capability required for software as a service delivery.

Mr DeWalt would not say which products would first receive the software as a service treatment, but said the company was "thinking about our whole product line".

Since the late 1990s, EMC has broadened its revenue mix from about 90 per cent hardware and 10 per cent software and services to about 46 per cent hardware, 37 per cent software and 17 percent services, close to its goal of a 40-40-20 split.

Along the way it spent $US4.2 billion on software acquisitions, on businesses such as Documentum, Legato and Vmware.

Company insiders say EMC is wary of competitors being able to offer rival products based on the fashionable software as a service model, proved out in the market by the likes of CRM outfit Salesforce.com.

Meanwhile, EMC chief executive and chairman Joe Tucci told a crowd of more than 4000 at the EMC World show that the company would continue its aggressive acquisition strategy.

"We are going to use some of our balance sheets assets to go and acquire more technology. There are more companies we have on our hit list," Mr Tucci said.

Areas targeted for acquisitions, as well as more internal R&D spending included information lifecycle management, virtualisation, model-based resource management, information security and grid computing for storage.