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EMC Promises Open Source, Prototypes Consumer Gear

Posted on: Thursday, 27 April 2006, 06:00 CDT

EMC Corp is set to step up its involvement with open source code, and on another front has developed prototype consumer products that look unlikely to ever reach the market.

"We will be embracing Open Source, and we'll be donating some of our own software," EMC CEO Joe Tucci said. "But we'll have to compartmentalize it. If you integrate your own products with open source code, you risk tainting your own software."

The company is already on the fringes of the open source movement. Since last year, EMC's VMware Inc processor virtualization subsidiary has been making some of its source code available, although only to "community" partners chosen by EMC.

Speaking about the consumer products, Tucci said: "Just a short walk from here I could show you a set of very interesting home and desktop products that we've built. They're prototypes."

But don't expect a mini-Symmetrix on your desktop any time soon. "The problem is how do you take these products to market? EMC is a b2b company," Tucci said. "The only person in my top two tiers of management with a lot of experience in this is [marketing EVP] Howard Elias who was at Tandy, and that was ten years ago." Tandy Corp owns the chain of Radio Shack consumer electronics stores.

"If we did it, we'd probably do something similar to Cisco," the CEO said, referring to Cisco's purchase of desktop router-maker LinkSys, which gave Cisco a route into the desktop router market.

Another options would be an OEM or licensing deal with an third-party consumer products brand name. "The way we would not go is to do it ourselves," Tucci said, before concluding""I don't know if we'll ever go into this [market] at all."

Source: Datamonitor

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