Internal Email Says EMC Execs Were Worried About 'BlackBerry Moment'

Internal emails from an EMC Corporation EMC executive shows that the data storage company was worried about a "Blackberry moment" in 2014, well before Dell agreed to buy it for $67 billion last October, according to a report on Business Insider. http://www.businessinsider.in/Internal-email-at-the-company-Dell-is-buying-for-67-billion-shows-fear-of-a-Blackberry-moment/articleshow/51450274.cms The rise of flash storage technology and strong competition from Pure Storage Inc PSTG have put EMC in a spot of bother. In response, EMC acquired the flash storage company XtremIO for $430 million in 2012. And now some emails have surfaced showing how scared some folks at EMC were due to the cut-throat competition in the flash storage market. "This is truly our Blackberry moment and we need to be ultra aggressive around XtremIO at this exact moment because we have an 18-month window to win this war," Michael Wing, EMC's SVP of Primary Storage, wrote in an email in July 2014. The email, submitted as part of a lawsuit against Pure Storage that wrapped this week, show Wing urging other EMC executives to put more support behind XtremIO, and move away from its more legacy products, like Symmetrix and VNX, the report said. In fact, EMC also considered acquiring Pure Storage and keep it as its mid-tier solutions, while selling XtremIO products to enterprise customers. "Bottom line is, if we want to dominate this massive move towards all flash, we likely have to acquire [Pure Storage] as we've discussed and it becomes our mid-tier flash solution and ExtremIO is our enterprise class version," Wing wrote in an another email sent in February 2014. However, those talks didn't materialize and subsequently Pure Storage became public in October 2015. Shares of EMC were down 0.19 percent at $26.40, and Pure Storage fell 3 percent at $12.60.