Steve Ballmer Speech Transcript – EMC Technology Summit

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage President and CEO Mr. Joe Tucci.

JOSEPH M. TUCCI: I hope you don’t mind. I brought a friend of mine with me. I think you all know Steve Ballmer. (Applause.)

Just let me just step back for a second, and I want to welcome everybody. I’ll be here the whole time with you and I do have another slot to speak on Wednesday, but I did want to welcome you and there is some press here, too, and welcome to the press.

And, of course, one of the things that I’ve tried to do in my tenure as CEO is to really work on the partnership side of EMC, and I’m convinced 100 percent to really succeed and meet the needs that you set for us we need to have great alliances and partnerships with some of the best of breed technology companies. And certainly I think unarguably at the top of that heap is Microsoft, and that’s why Steve and I are here today. We’re going to use this time to launch a new product and talk about our new alliance.

So obviously the alliance we’ve had has gone back many years, but truly we’re bringing this alliance now to the next level. And as part of this alliance, there are three major areas that we’re going to work on. The first one is basically we’re going to integrate Microsoft APIs very tightly with EMC’s storage solutions and functionality. As you know, for years Microsoft has been embedding these APIs into their operating systems and have done a tremendous job. And, of course, by us, I think, integrating those better with our rich functionality we can provide you just a tremendous experience in the Windows environment.

Secondly, we’re going to work with Microsoft to continue to develop these APIs and define future APIs for the storage industry and again this will very much enrich your experience.

And maybe a way to look at this, if you’re an administrator that understands Windows today through a common interface, you’ll be able to not only manage your Windows environment but also much more of the storage environment so I think it’s very powerful.

And again we believe that with this, Windows will be the premier operating system for networks in a network storage environment, so again I think very powerful, a lot of benefit to all of us here today.

The second part of the announcement, very important to us, is we basically have licensed from Microsoft their Windows Powered NAS [Network Attached Storage] and we’ll actually put out a product called NetWin using Windows Powered NAS, and I’ll tell you what NetWin is in a second here. NetWin at the storage layer has a CX200 that Dave Donatelly just talked to you about. The next layer up is obviously an Intel server. The ones that we will be reselling will come from our two partners, Dell and Fujitsu Siemens. On top of that obviously you run Windows Powered NAS. On top of that there is a layer of code that we’re called Navisphere WPN, and again it not only lets you manage the Windows environment, but also lets you – with the same commands that you’re used to using – will let you manage the storage environment, again we think very powerful.

The second part of this piece of the announcement is that we’re also taking a lot of the Windows functionality and tightly embedding it into our Celerra NAS server. Again, what this means, we’ve just upped the ante in enterprise NAS and this Windows compatibility is that ante that we upped. (Applause.)

Here’s what our product family looks like. You can take a standard server, embedded SCSI drives; in fact, you can start at US$7,000. Here’s where the EMC NetWin product fits in that I talked to you about. That will be somewhat less than $50,000, depending on the configuration. Then you have our Celerra based appliance, the NS600. You can see the price range for that. And then you go up to the industry’s only really consolidated NAS head, which is our big CNS Celerra NAS Server. Of course, behind that goes either CLARiiON or Symmetrix and that’s $175,000 on up, plus the price of the storage.

So, I think we have a full set of products here, again Windows compatibility across the entire product line, a common management interface and using EMC Encore software we’re tying for file distribution, we’re trying the core and the edge together. So we think far and away this is the way NAS will be done and much more, much more Windows compatibility in the whole line.

Announcement three is all about you: our customers. We’re going to do joint sales and marketing and we’re going to make sure: very, very important that we pre-integrate – do a lot of testing – so that when you get it, it works every time and we’ll work with you very well on joint service and support tasks.

The benefits here I think are numerous, but again, it’s the seamless integration and the work that our two companies are doing up front to make your experience with our joint products the best in the industry.

So with that, let me again thank Steve for joining me and turn it over to Steve for a few remarks. Steve, thank you very much. (Applause.)

STEVE BALLMER: Great. Thanks, Joe.

Well, I couldn’t be more delighted to have the opportunity to be here today. I want to thank Joe and the team from EMC.

I think Joe said it well. We’ve had an alliance for years and we really made a commitment that I would say kind of Joe has initiated on behalf of EMC and I’ve sponsored at Microsoft to really ratchet up the level of cooperation between our two companies quite dramatically.

It is no secret that we continue to drive and push and work on new scenarios for Windows in the enterprise data center, and it’s really no secret the incredible position and product line that EMC has in terms of enterprise storage.

And really getting the right partnership and relationship so that solutions are easier to manage, easier to take care of, more reliable, higher availability, has really been at the backbone I would say of our discussion and cooperation.

Joe went through the elements of the partnership and relationship. We’ve gone as far as to license some of the core protocols inside Windows to the EMC team so we could make sure we get the level of interoperability that, as Joe highlights, should be the ante for the next generation of enterprise NAS. We think that’s pretty important.

And we think it’s pretty important that we’re in a position together with you to make sure that you can put in whatever kind of solution you want and really drive it with an integrated offer from us, integrated supported, integrated service.

Speaking on behalf of Microsoft, I’d say we are very committed to make sure that our technologies are more important, more and more important every year in the storage arena. We think we’re going to go win a lot of NAS business together.

We’re excited to have the opportunity to compete for your business in that area. And we think if you stop and see the kinds of applications that we put in the market — e-mail, large database solutions, file share, collaboration systems — all of those at the end of the day have a significant storage component and we need to make sure our operating system facilitates the creation of applications that are storage smart where the operating system, the storage device and the application all get a chance to participate in how storage is used and managed. And at that level I think we’re pleased with the initial work we have on storage APIs, but EMC has got a lot of incredible ideas in this area, and we’ll work together to continue to push forward very aggressively.

We made an announcement last week, which for us was very significant. As of last week, with the shipment of our Windows Server 2003 product, the number one system in the world, the number one high-performance system in the world for running TPC-C database benchmarks is an Itanium system from Hewlett-Packard that runs Windows and runs our SQL Server database. We can transact over 600,000 TPC-C on that system per minute and it’s really incredible for me to think about that it was only a few years ago that we were trying valiantly to just have good price performance. Now we have the absolute leading performance server.

That opens up a set of new vistas for us in terms of applications that we think we can work with your customers on in the data center but we know those applications are meaningless unless a good high-end application server can be teamed with really the high-end of the storage world. That’s the position that EMC has had essentially here now for a number of years. It’s an area, as I sit and take a look at all of these big boxes that I know I’m — what shall I say — in the company of people who understand high-end storage very well and we think the partnership will really give you a set of new options in terms of compute power, application processing and storage in the enterprise data center.

It’s a real pleasure and privilege to have a chance to have this partnership, to get a chance to discuss it with you today and I know on behalf of both Microsoft and EMC we look forward for the opportunity to help you realize some of the advantage of these new integrated technologies.

Thanks very much.

(Applause.)