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I just finished a conference call with Larry Zulch of Dantz, and some EMC folks on the recent, (hours old in fact) acquisition of Dantz by EMC, and what that means to the Mac market in particular.

Some backstory on my relations with EMC in the SMB, (Small to Medium Business) market first:

"Not a pleasant experience" would be the way to describe it. Even as recently as three weeks or so ago, trying to talk to EMC when your budget was well under 100K elicited a reaction that came across as "Oh god, more poor people. Here, something you can afford, can we go now?" (No, they didn't say that. But once our budget was laid on the table, the tone of the meeting took a decidedly worse tone.) There was a complete disconnect between the capabilities of the SMB market and what EMC, as a company had to offer. Even the Dell/EMC partnership didn't seem to help much on the EMC side. Dell obviously understands this market very well, but it seemed that EMC was still living in a world of million - dollar budgets and vendor lock in. As well, EMC has historically viewed the Mac market as something other people dealt with, when they acknowledged Apple at all.

So when I saw the press release on this, and read the FAQ, I was not feeling terribly confident. In addition to writing hither and yon, I am also an IT manager. I have been for well over a decade, and have been using Retrospect for most of that time. There's a professional concern about this acquisition both journalistically, and in my "real" job. Since I figured that real information, (as much as possible) is better than guessing, I gave EMC and Dantz a call.

My conversation with them shows that they get that this deal is being viewed warily by Dantz's Mac user base. The EMC folks all said "We just don't have the DNA to move in the SMB market." Allowing for the overloading of DNA as a term, that's a pretty big admission. "We don't know what we're doing here." For a company like EMC, that has made its money from knowing precisely what it was doing, that's a large bite of crow to get down.

EMC's position on this is that the Mac market was one reason they bought Dantz. They realize that in the SMB world, there is a strong Apple presence, and that they have even less experience with the Mac market than they do with the SMB market. So they view Dantz as their best path to success in the SMB market. EMC is seeing Dantz's history in the Mac market, the SMB market, their heterogeneous product line, and the infrastructure that Dantz has in place for doing business in the SMB market as their best chance to make up for past missteps in that arena. As Larry Zulch said, "If EMC was not interested in the Mac market, they could have easily bought another company that has no Mac presence".

Dantz's point of view on this is that they're getting access to more resources for Retrospect, which will allow them to concentrate those resources on their products, in particular, the Mac server product, which Larry Zulch admitted was as patched as it could be, and that they were working on, (no dates given, sorry) the replacement for the Mac server which will be, as he puts it, "a product done the right way". He admits that it's hurting them short term, but that it would be, in the long term, worse to continue patching a code base that has been wrung out as far as it can go. As he put it, Retrospect 6 on the Mac is their first "real" Mac OS X product. I can't say that I disagree with him.

Both Larry Zulch and the EMC representatives admit that they have a lot of work to do. Dantz has made missteps that are well-known in the Mac market, and EMC's bungled handling of the SMB market is legendary among IT managers in that space. They all said that they are committed to making this work, not just for Windows users, but for Mac users too. Larry Zulch also said that there would be announcements at Macworld in January. He didn't say what they were, so I don't have any details for you on that. (The cynic in me says that every vendor at Macworld has an announcement, the realist says "wait and see".)

I realize there's not a lot of hard information. Well, to be fair, the press release is hours old as of this writing, so there's not a lot of hard information to be had. "Keep an open mind" is what Dantz and EMC are asking for, and that makes sense. It's going to take a month just to sort out email routing and HR issues, so expecting much of anything prior to Macworld is probably unrealistic. But they were very explicit as to continuing Mac support, and even increasing support for Dantz's Mac products. As to what that translates to, we'll have to wait and see.

Now, as to what I would like to see at Macworld, as an IT manager running Mac networks:

• A more definite announcement for the Mac Server product. The standard line of "It'll be better, really" and excuses about old code bases have lost all but a thin, frayed thread of tolerance. We've been waiting on this "Great Update" since Mac OS X came out. Version 6 is what Version 5 should have been, so in a very real sense, we're way behind on this.


• Real Mac OS X support in EMC's product line. Notes about NFS support aren't going to cut it. For a lower end system, and considering that all the parts of the OS EMC needs to deal with is open source, there has to be real support for Mac OS X for things like the Clarion AX100 level stuff. No one realistically expects EMC to support OS X on the high end, but if they're serious about the SMB market, then that market definition has to include Mac OS X in more than an incidental manner. As well, EMC showing real interest in the Mac market will go a long way towards allaying fears about Retrospect Mac.


• Some realism when talking about SANs and other products in the SMB market. I understand that for their high-end products, EMC wants tight control over the configuration, but in the SMB market, a company can't afford to trash all their existing hardware, not even for EMC. Even a modest, (to EMC) cost increase can kill a project or a deal. That means that if a customer has Linux on multiple platforms, a *BSD box or two, some Macs as servers and clients, Windows, etc, that all of those need to be treated with legitmacy. Telling a 100 - person company "You'll have to replace your non-Windows and non-x86 Linux servers with Windows and Red Hat on Intel, and you'll have to buy all new fiber - attached RAID" will kill any chance of that deal happening.


• Finally, just listen to what a customer wants and needs and sell them something for that. Not even EMC knows my business better than I do, and I have these odd ideas that I, and not EMC, am better suited to integrating new storage and back up products and choosing directions for my business. I know that FC drives have better specs than SATA, but if I only have a SATA budget, then play nice with me anyway.

So while I'm not skipping through the daisies after this conversation, I'm also not ready to dump Retrospect either. I guess my attitude at this point, is open - minded, but cautious, or as the late President Reagan said:

"Trust, but verify".

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