EMC Accelerates Innovation with Employees Around the World

HOPKINTON, MASS - October 24, 2008 -

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, hosted its second annual Innovation Conference which brought together more than 1,000 EMC employees and technical development teams from around the globe for a physical and virtual symposium focused on EMC’s commitment to innovation and technology leadership. The event also featured an Innovation Showcase of 30 finalist ideas that were evaluated by participants and a panel of technical judges who recognized and awarded five winners.

The finalist ideas for the 2008 EMC Innovation Showcase covered a broad range of business, process and technology categories including cloud computing, collaboration and knowledge management as well as information infrastructure resource management.

“The EMC Innovation Conference is dedicated to inspire, empower and honor our technical community and to ultimately expand EMC’s market leadership with new products, capabilities and processes. This is an important venue for uniting our employees globally and accelerating the innovation process that traditionally takes place within individual groups scattered at facilities around the world,” said Jeff Nick, EMC Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. “This year’s event celebrated the new technical communities, new customer interactions, new connections, new communications vehicles, and new commitments to action that are combining to drive greater innovation at EMC. The EMC Innovation Conference is an improved forum for sharing technical vision, innovation success, and best practices, and allows us to recognize and reward some of our brightest employees for their innovative ideas and technical leadership.”

In advance of the 2008 Innovation Conference, EMC employees from 19 countries submitted 984 ideas – proposals for new technologies, products or processes – that were evaluated by a panel of EMC Fellows, Distinguished Engineers and other technical leaders who determined the list of 30 finalists that were featured in the innovation showcase. Of the 30 finalists, who presented detailed plans, four ideas were selected by an executive judging panel as winners based on their breakthrough thinking, their potential to change the course of the company or the IT industry, the value potentially created for customers, strategic relevance to EMC’s business, and the ease of implementation. Additionally, a “People’s Choice Award” was selected by conference attendees and other EMC employees who voted via the EMC Innovation Network, EMC’s online platform where employees worldwide collaborate to innovate.

• First Place: A disruptive cloud computing solution that cost effectively offers consumers a networked, “lifetime service” for personal storage and information management. EMC Innovator: Manu Fontaine
• Second Place: A digital archiving solution designed to ensure long-term future data readability. EMC Innovator: Steve Todd.
• Third Place: A security solution that protects consumers against physical identity theft complete with GPS tracking. EMC Innovators: RSA Laboratories.
• Honorable Mention: A social computing platform for harnessing talent to overcome organizational and functional barriers to innovative collaboration. EMC Innovators: 30+ employees from across EMC.
• “People’s Choice”: A semantic search approach to mining internal company data, making it simple for employees to access information quickly and easily and in efficient formats. EMC Innovators: multiple contributors from Ireland and the United States.

The 2008 Innovation Conference was open to EMC employees worldwide, with the objective of fostering companywide collaboration that will lead to the delivery of breakthrough technologies and solutions for EMC customers. The conference, held at EMC’s manufacturing campus in Franklin, Mass., included presentations, panels, and live Q&A sessions with EMC executives, university research partners and guest speakers from both the World Economic Forum and EMC customers. During the two-day event, employees participated from around the world in the conference sessions via live internet video broadcast and instant relay chat. For the first time this included an “Innovation at the Centers of Excellence (CoE) World Tour,” featuring multi-site live video conferencing from the EMC CoE teams based in China, India, Ireland, Israel, and Russia.

The finalist submissions for this year’s Innovation Showcase covered a broad range of business, process and technology categories, including:

Innovating for IT Efficiency

• Technology and process ideas that promote cost savings and energy efficiency by automating IT asset management; new solutions for remote disk data erasure as well as a community source platform for collaborative problem solving and innovation on corporate and IT sustainability issues.

Information Management for Consumers

• Proposals for mobile device data protection and recovery as well as lifetime information storage and management in the cloud.

Collaboration and Knowledge Management

• New paradigms for improving how corporations empower knowledge workers, a new platform for ‘bartering’ IT resources, new approaches to linking information with the venture capital community to foster and monetize innovation, and new Web 2.0-based knowledge analysis solutions for healthcare providers.

Security Innovations for Consumers and Business

• New approaches, technologies and methodologies to improve security for corporations and consumers in areas such as identity management, protecting against physical theft, RFID security, universal authentication, secure mobile device storage, encryption and data security management.

Jeff Nick reflected on the progress made since last year’s inaugural event, sharing with employees EMC’s latest thinking on technology strategy, collaboration and innovation while providing an update on the development progress of winning ideas from the 2007 Innovation Conference.

“Looking back at 2007 we have real examples of ideas that blossomed into products that are benefiting customers today,” said Nick. “Another huge leap we’ve made since last year is the partnerships within EMC that are now blossoming to turn these ideas into reality. The 2007 event gave us a runway and a platform to socialize and build on the collective ideas of our partnership with EMC’s Centers of Excellence. This year we’re focusing on scaling the program with the global centers of excellence for targeted idea incubation.”

EMC recognized its most exemplary technical employees as part of its Corporate EMC Fellow & Distinguished Engineer Program. In its second year, the program honors those individual technical contributors who have demonstrated outstanding achievement in a broad range of technical leadership within their business units and across EMC. The following individuals were honored at an Innovators Induction gala and welcomed into the 2008 class of EMC Fellows and Distinguished Engineers:

EMC Fellow
Robert Solomon

EMC Distinguished Engineers
Roy E. Clark
Jim Dowson
Sorin Faibish
Francesco Gennari
Doug LeCrone
Dr. Philip Love
Dr. Peter William Madany
Dr. Amnon Naamad
Magnus Nyström
Craig Randall
Steve Todd

“EMC’s well-deserved global reputation as a top-tier technology company has been years in the making. It’s the direct result of having tremendously talented engineers around the world develop innovative technology, products, and solutions that contribute substantial value to our customers and set the standard for the industry,” said Nick. “Through the contributions of this growing community of Fellows and Distinguished Engineers, I’m confident that EMC will more fully leverage the ideas, inventions, and development efforts of all of our technical leaders and spur the creation of more cross-domain solutions for customers.”

EMC also launched a new Innovation Network Lecture Series, designed to deliver practical explanations of emerging explorations in technology innovation and research through the EMC Innovation Network. The series is hosted by Dr. Burt Kaliski, Director of the EMC Innovation Network, who is responsible for developing the corporate research program. Visit the EMC Innovation Network Lecture Series web site to register for live and recorded webinars that feature EMC experts and special guests sharing research insights on various topics ranging from enterprise information management, service oriented architectures and cloud computing security.