Quoting from the Houston Chronicle

...

But competitors say EMC, perhaps distracted by its overhaul, is leaving them openings. EMC admitted that execution issues this spring left it unable to meet some orders for a new storage system.

IBM and other rivals also cite a concept known as "virtualization." Among other things, it lets network administrators maximize the efficiency of their storage setups.

This would figure to be a natural for EMC, given its storage expertise and its $635 million acquisition of VMWare Inc., a leader in virtualizing the operation of servers.

But EMC was late getting a major storage virtualization product, Invista, off the ground. Executives say EMC was careful in developing Invista rather than rushing it into a young market.

"You put all the (industry's) virtualization revenues in a thimble, you'd have plenty of room for your thumb," Tucci said.

However, even reasonably explained delays may lead to perceptions that EMC can't afford.

"The larger vendors, all included, they're slow to innovate in some of these things," said Toby Ford, chief technical officer of USinternetworking Inc., which has EMC storage but recently bought a virtualized system from 3Pardata Inc., a private vendor backed by Oracle, Symantec Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.

One large EMC customer, Steve McCaa, principal technical architect at legal records analyzer Kroll Ontrack Inc., says that if Invista's ongoing development achieves its goals, it should outperform existing virtualization techniques.

Still, he added: "I think Invista development has been a little slower than I would like to have seen." He's not sure whether to blame EMC's perfectionism or the company's transformation.

"I do have a fear that as they try to expand that information focus they're going to lose some of the engineering prowess they've shown in the storage environment," McCaa said.

EMC executives say they're not finished mapping the future, and seem to have some flexibility. The company has no debt. Even with its acquisition spree it has had enough cash to be a big buyer of its own stock _ to the tune of $1 billion last year and $3 billion this year.

"If you look at the tools they have, they're pretty far along," said analyst Jasmine Noel at Ptak, Noel. "What they haven't done yet is put the wrapper on it."

Read the entire article, here.