EMC execs insist the future is bright despite fears of tech bubble

In a cavernous convention centre in front of 12,000 people lit by lasers and with smoke machines billowing, a man in his mid-40s took to the stage playing a distorted guitar solo — it was EMC’s chief marketing officer Jeremy Burton.

In a connecting hall, a group of masseuses worked knots out of conference attendees’ shoulders while gymnasts enacted a life-size version of connect four against a wall while exhausted attendees slumped into bean bags to recover.

EMC is the world’s sixth biggest software company with a market capitalisation in excess of $50bn (€36bn). However, its recent performance has missed analysts’ estimates and in January it announced that it was going to let 1,000 staff go.

The EMC World conference in Las Vegas coincides with the collapses of Twitter on the stock market and burgeoning fears that the tech sector is facing a crash after bubble valuations.

Despite billionaire hedge fund manager, David Einhorn declaring “a second tech bubble,” EMC executives remain confident. Vice president of marketing at RSA, EMC’s security division, Brian Fitzgerald, said that the big change for tech companies is that they now have to demonstrate that they can make money.

“There is a little more emphasis on can these companies make money, so they are going to have to demonstrate that,” he said. Mr Fitzgerald drew parallels with the original dotcom boom when the investing world had largely declared that internet companies were over.

He said that the main problem was that it takes a little longer for companies to deliver the benefits that they claim the market demand.

“It will be bumpy along that way, but it will absolutely happen, you will see a correction I suspect, but I don’t think that the potential value of the new IT models is all false. It is real, it just always takes longer than we would like for it to become real,” he said.

He added that despite the declarations of the death of the internet in 2000, all of the benefits that led to the bubble in valuations have largely come to pass.

“If you look back to the dotcom crash in 2000 and the predictions from 1998, they largely happened, it wasn’t the end of the web; most of the benefits actually happened. Look at Google and Amazon, so you get there,” he said.

EMC Global Services chief technology officer, Bill Schmarzo, said that they were looking at technology that can transform business all over the world.

“We are going to help organisations be much more successful on the business side and we will be able to help enjoy that success with them, so I think that there are opportunities. I don’t know what that does to stock valuations, not my area of expertise, but I don’t think that big data is hype. I think it is real and what you will start to see is organisations stop talking about it as a technology. It is the foundation that can rejuvenate a business,” he said.

He believes that the biggest challenge is that they are facing more opportunities than they know what to do with.

“The challenge for big data isn’t the lack of opportunities for most organisations it is too many. That is where they get paralysed,” he said.