Saving money with innovative software

Budgets are being carefully examined as companies look to cut costs, and no part is being left unexamined. Firms that have trimmed spending to a minimum could do well to make investments that conversely lead to cost savings, however, and that trend has led to more energy-efficient operations and technology that streamline organization structures. EMC, a software firm, continues to sell data storage and security frameworks with an initial startup cost but save money in the long term. Paul St. John, EMC's director of sales for the CEE region, told The Prague Post that innovation has in turn become more creative during an economic downturn.

The Prague Post: How can additional software purchases save money for companies, as you claim?

Paul St. John: A big trend has to do with virtual projects. Instead of a 100 servers, you can go down to 10 by making some of them virtual, so you have virtual machines within the actual servers. It increases floor space, reduces electricity costs. For example, my work computer is an icon on the desktop of my personal computer. All I have to do is double click on the icon, and I have my work desktop and files.

TPP: Has EMC been able to expand its portfolio of services recently?

PS: EMC started out as a data-storage company, but we recently purchased Documentum, which manages all of the content for a company. We also bought a security identification system that monitors for data loss, and we offer a backup software system. That's important for a lot of financial institutions. If you're an HR company and your whole system crashes, you care of course, but it's not critical to be live again in five minutes. If you're a trader or a bank that trades currency, you can't lose 30 seconds; there's no downtime.

TPP: How do you sell all these products to companies that are laying off workers and freezing spending?

PS: EMC is pretty well positioned to help with cost reduction. If you go to a business today and don't present a return on investment, then forget it; it doesn't matter if you're selling golf balls or computers. If a customer says they can't afford it, we can say OK, how about if we virtualize half of your content and save you $100,000? It's a way of causing cost reduction so you can allow them to invest in other programs. You can change the business so you take operational costs down and give them more money for innovations.

TPP: Do leaner times shift software purchasing trends in companies to different sorts of products?

PS: They don't buy different things, but they continue to buy the same things at the same levels. The mentality is simply different. If you need to buy a lot of data storage, you're going to look into an array of services to find the best way to organize content. The recession is a difficult time, but it allows these discussions to happen because people want to be more efficient and optimize what they have.

TPP: What's the biggest hit EMC has taken as a result of the downturn?

PS: Currency fluctuations have really hurt business. Say a company has a budget of a set amount of crowns. At one point, that amount meant you could buy a new Mac, which is priced in dollars. All of the sudden, your budget isn't worth as much, and you can only buy two Macs instead of three.

TPP: Do sales pitches for money-saving software also include the angle that they're environmentally friendly?

PS: I think that's starting to happen a bit because customers want to become less energy reliant. I think it's more of a selling point in the West than it is in the East. Sometimes, we tell a customer, you'll save X amount on electricity, and they don't seem to care that much. It's funny what different sectors are interested in. We were working with one group of doctors who didn't care much about data storage, but when we told them the virtualization software would give them more floorspace, that's when they got excited because it let them run their business better.

Claire Compton can be reached at
ccompton@praguepost.com