Earnings Preview: EMC To Report 3Q Results

JORDAN ROBERTSON

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — EMC Corp. is scheduled to report its third-quarter results before the market opens Thursday. Below is a summary of key developments and analyst opinion related to the period.

OVERVIEW: Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC scored a big new hire last month when Pat Gelsinger, a 30-year veteran of Intel Corp. who ran the chip maker's main division, took a job as EMC's president and chief operating officer for "information infrastructure" products.

Also, EMC emerged as the victor this summer in a bidding contest that revved up a staid but increasingly critical part of the computing world. EMC outbid rival NetApp Inc. for a company called Data Domain, whose technology prevents companies from storing information multiple times, which lowers costs. Data Domain had originally agreed to be acquired by NetApp, until EMC swooped in with a higher offer worth $2.1 billion.

In August, EMC bought FastScale Technology, a software company whose technology helps companies manage their applications and decrease the amount of memory and disk space their programs are eating up. EMC also bought Kazeon Systems, whose technology helps companies collect and analyze their data.