[link|http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s=25200&a=22806,00.asp|A blow for competition?]

Excerpt:

If other storage makers don't want to work with EMC Corp. to share development interfaces, then EMC will target its rivals' products with reverse engineering.

EMC, considered the leader in enterprise direct-attached storage, needs its competitors to share their application programming interfaces so the Hopkinton, Mass., company can make its promise of vendor-agnostic management software, called AutoIS, come true. But since EMC announced AutoIS four months ago, only Compaq Computer Corp. has signed on. Others, including Hitachi Ltd., IBM, Sun Microsystems Inc. and Fujitsu Ltd., are choosing to compete against EMC and AutoIS and not share APIs.

Discussions between EMC and its competitors for API sharing are ongoing, but they're proceeding slowly and roughly, sources close to EMC told eWEEK. One Compaq official said the competitors may work with Compaq instead.

"You will see additional announcements of API agreements between Compaq and other major storage vendors sooner than you'll see them from EMC. I think others are more comfortable dealing with us," said Mark Lewis, vice president of Compaq's enterprise storage group, in Houston.

But EMC officials say that even if API negotiations with other vendors fail, the company will still push forward to develop ways of making its software interoperate with the hardware of others.

"The lack of cooperation will in no way, shape or form derail the AutoIS initiative. We have the resources and the intelligence to do it the hard way," said Don Swatik, vice president of alliances at EMC.

Asked to define "the hard way," Swatik said, "There's SNMP interfaces, there's XML interfaces, there's Telnet interfaces, there's CLIs [command line interfaces]. A skilled engineering organization like EMC's, who's spent a decade reverse engineering every server in the industry, knows how to utilize these interfaces and how to gain access to the products."