Sun, EMC ink development agreement

EMC and Sun Microsystems have agreed to a number of development projects aimed at ensuring the compatibility of their products, the latest joint effort in a longstanding partnership between the companies.

Specifically, EMC plans to port its storage software, including PowerPath and Legato NetWorker, to Sun's Solaris 10 operating system. The company will also port its Documentum, Legato and Smarts programs to the operating system on systems with both Sparc and Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors, the companies said Thursday.

The work should help businesses use Sun and EMC technologies together to share, protect and store data, they said.

The companies also agreed to jointly handle customer support calls, and Sun will continue to resell EMC's Legato NetWorker as its backup and recovery software.

Sun and EMC said they're also discussing joint technical efforts related to Sun's Cluster software and a number of other technologies.

Joe Tucci, EMC's CEO should STILL be fired.

In business school, I was taught that the objective of a publicly held corporation was to maximize shareholder wealth. In February, 2001, I purchased shares of EMC for $54 each. The stock has recently and over the last three years at least, traded in the $12-$15 range thereby minimizing my wealth. The company doesn't even pay dividend and its promised stock buy-back scheme has been fruitless for shareholders. Moreover, EMC is erroneously executing an acquisitions strategy for growth just as WorldCom mistakenly did. I don't need to remind your where WCOM is today. Instead of buying more companies, EMC should declare a special dividend to shareholders as compensation for losses and partner with other leading technology companies. It's apparent that the company has been mismanaged and a change is necessary.

Accordingly, the board of EMC, if it has shareholder's best interest in mind as it should, should move to fire Joe Tucci, EMC's CEO. Just as the board of Hewlett-Packard had the balls to fire chief executive Carleton S. Fiorina, EMC's board is obligated to sack its CEO. Skeptics should simply take a gander at EMC's five year stock chart. It ain't pretty.

Thanks for reading my rant.