EMC lower on Pac Crest downgrade; data lake platform launched
- Four days after Piper downgraded EMC (EMC -1.5%) and rival NetApp to Neutral due to competitive concerns, Pac Crest has downgraded EMC to Sector Perform, while citing "increasing seasonal, secular and competitive risks."
- Pac Crest reports seeing "weak storage field checks in a seasonally slow first quarter," as well as "an increasing appetite" among customers to consolidate their storage resources. The firm also sees investments in new products limiting near-term earnings growth.
- Pac Crest was more bullish on EMC in January. It originally upgraded the storage giant to Outperform in June 2013, when shares were at a dividend-adjusted $23.66.
- Amidst the downgrades, EMC has launched its Federation Business Data Lake, a soup-to-nuts solution for companies launching big data/analytics projects that rely on data lakes - massive data repositories that holds data in its native formats. The solution combines servers from EMC's VCE unit and scale-out NAS storage from its Isilon unit, as well as VMware's virtualization software and Pivotal's big data software suite, which includes the Greenplum analytics database and a distribution of the popular Hadoop big data framework.
- EMC is also giving customers the option of using the Hadoop distributions of market leaders Hortonworks (HDP +0.7%) and Cloudera. Its solution acts as an alternative to data warehousing offerings from the likes of Informatica (reportedly in buyout talks) and Teradata (TDC -0.6%), which involve more heavily refining and structuring data. Teradata admits lakes can be implemented faster, support more data types, and provide cheap storage, but also argues warehouses are better for querying cleansed, structured, data.
For the latest updates on the stock market, visit,
http://daytradingstock-blog.blogspot.com
