HOPKINTON, MA -- EMC Corporation announced today that Sears, Roebuck and Co., a leading retailer of apparel, home and automotive products and services, is implementing 95 new terabytes of EMC networked information storage, as well as open management software and global services, in a customer-intelligence initiative aimed at improving customer satisfaction and the performance of 2,500 stores nationwide. "The retail business is tougher than ever, with aggressive competition in both price and assortment. Our challenge is to ensure that customers find the merchandise and service they want in our stores, while eliminating what they don't want - faster than the competition," said Jonathan Rand, Sears' Director of Merchandise Planning and Reporting. "Our EMC infrastructure will allow us to tightly integrate information about customer buying trends with other data sources such as inventory and sales. This way, we can more easily correlate various data points and improve our decision-making about assortments, promotions, margins and inventory - in short, optimize productivity." Sears is working with EMC Global Services to implement an EMC storage area network (SAN) designed to provide Sears with strategic customer information while reducing overall management costs through increased storage utilization. The EMC infrastructure is based on EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems and EMC Connectrix fibre-channel switches that will consolidate data residing on Sun Solaris/UNIX and Compaq servers running Windows NT. EMC ControlCenter, Symmetrix Optimizer and ESN Manager have been implemented to more efficiently manage storage resources across its storage network. The retailer also is utilizing additional EMC Data Manager (EDM) integrated hardware and software solutions to provide data backup and restore for a variety of business applications. "The reliability, performance and flexibility of EMC networked information storage will make our information significantly more accessible, and as a result, more powerful," Rand said. Sears' EMC SAN will serve as a central repository for information spread across a number of different applications. EMC's high-density disk technology and SAN software tools enable users to scale to virtually unlimited storage capacities and plug new applications into the EMC infrastructure. "The customer support and software tools that complement EMC storage systems make it easy to manage our information. We are tripling the size our EMC infrastructure, yet we do not plan to increase our administrative manpower," said Dave Schoening, Sears' Technology Director. Sears, based in Hoffman Estates, Ill., uses a total of 140 terabytes of EMC information storage systems and software to support assortment planning, merchandise planning, SAS business-intelligence projects, e-business initiatives, human resources and NCR Teradata data warehousing applications. Frank Hauck, EMC's Executive Vice President of Customer Operations, said, "Sears' new EMC infrastructure will efficiently absorb and broaden access to the rapid accumulation of customer intelligence in the years ahead. EMC's industry lead in storage performance, reliability, and manageability helps Sears and other successful companies to use data in new and expanded ways that will help generate more sales and improve customer satisfaction." For more information visit www.emc.com