With a handful of my journalist peers (Bloomberg News, Wall Street Journal, San Jose Mercury News and Investor's Business Daily), I attended a "fireside chat" this afternoon with EMC chief, Joe Tucci (pictured, left), and RSA's Art Coviello (right). I personally pushed to know more on EMC's Iomega acquisition and the company's consumer strategy. Because frankly I didn't really get why a "pure" enterprise company is now pushing hard for the consumers' wallet. Well, that was until Tucci mentioned an IDC study sponsored by EMC on the "Digital Universe".

"If you look at that study, it basically points out 2 things of great interest which I believed for a long time, even before that study. Number 1, individuals create 70% of the information that goes online. That study also points out that 85% of the information will be store in the cloud. So the real trick is going to marrying them together", said Tucci.

To explain Iomega's acquisition, Tucci used a Linksys/Cisco analogy:

"Before they acquired Linksys, you didn't think of Cisco as being a consumer company. Well think of us the same way. Iomega is going to take us to the consumer, the same way Linksys took Cisco", added Tucci.

During the meeting, it was also interesting to note that since Tucci became CEO of EMC, the storage company made no hardware acquisition, until Iomega. The 37+ acquisitions were all software related. So was the consumer market to much of a challenge for EMC, a company that build super reliable storage systems for Fortune 500 companies?

"Not at all. We could have done the hardware. No problem. Just like Cisco could have easily build a Linksys router. But they needed Linksys' experience in the consumer space, in retail. Same for us. We are all B2B folks. I don't know anything about the consumer. And Iomega is going to help us there".

No interest in acquiring a hard disk drive company
When I mentioned this to Tucci, he was quite skeptical. As much as archiving/tape has a role to play in storage, Tucci sees Flash-based solid-state drives as a potential replacement for the traditional rotating disks. Even more rapidly than before as prices continue to fall. Does this mark the end of Seagate et al? Perhaps not yet but its a clear indication to where the market is going. If the largest storage company in the world is moving big time to Flash, the market will follow. Time for Seagate to prepare those lawsuits against Flash makers!

EMC is going after Amazon Web Services
The other thing that came out of the meeting was that EMC will compete head-to-head with Amazon to provide cloud storage and compute services for SMBs and start-ups. They've started with Mozy, an online storage service that is being used by both consumers and Fortune 500. Which EMC will probably extended with some computer services a-la Amazon EC2. The duel will be quite an interesting one: the online bookstore versus the storage company!

"Our model will be somewhat different. We will definitely own some sites that are our own but we will also enable customers. A lot of big bank will have their own cloud infrastructures, as well as large telcos".