Tucci mentioned the plans during a discussion on the call about EMC targeting new markets and indicated areas where the company has already moved into, such as data security and server virtualization. SaaS was listed among the hot markets, and Tucci told listeners to "stay tuned" for products in this area.
One Wall Street analyst asked Tucci pointedly during the Q&A if this would mean further acquisitions, a subject on which Tucci was coy. "How much we'll develop ourselves or with our partners, and how much of this we'll 'jump start' by doing a small acquisition, we still want to keep to ourselves right now," he said.
However, Tucci also indicated that the products would be in the data backup and archiving space. "We'll have another alternative there for our customers, hosted on our premises," he said.
SaaS has begun to take off in storage as large Web companies, like Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc., step into the enterprise storage space, and it's growing clear that traditional storage players are reaching for their slice of the pie. In a separate announcement today, Symantec Corp. announced Symantec Protection Network, a software as a service (SaaS) platform aimed at small and midsized businesses (SMB). The first SaaS offering from Symantec, Online Backup Service based on Backup Exec, is scheduled to become available later this year.