The company supplied US$188 million worth of products and services to various US military departments and agencies between 2000 and 2009.

EMC’s global partners include such IT giants as Cisco, Dell and Hewlett-Packard. (See p.19, p.24, and pp.36-37.) Like these partners, EMC counts Israel’s Ministry of Defense among its valued customers, and supplies it with products used to store "mission-critical data."

EMC has had a base of operations in Israel since at least 1997. The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise explains that EMC still "does so much business in Israel that it is able to maintain an R&D plant there, and also has its own sales office to handle customers." EMC’s Israeli clients include Bezeq, the Israel Discount Bank (IDB) and El Al which – fuelled largely by Paz Oil – is the Israeli airline whose cargo operations have transported millions of rounds of US munitions to Israel for decades. (See Bezeq, pp.11-12, (See IDB and Paz Oil in table "CPP Investments.")

A seven-year corruption probe by the Israeli police and Israel’s Ministry of Defense was sparked in 2002 when EMC suspiciously received a digital storage contract from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Investigators suspected that Defense Ministry officials had leaked secret information to EMC from the closed tenders of other companies. EMC’s use of this "insider" information is alleged to have allowed it to beat rival bids from Hitachi Data Systems and Hewlett-Packard. (See Hitachi, p.38, and HP, pp.36-37.)

Yehuda Cohen, who was then in charge of procurement at Hewlett Packard, told Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, "As early as the next day [after EMC won], I knew that our competitors had known everything about our price bid." The Israeli military’s US procurement office was then led by Haim Adar. Haaretz revealed that when Adar later retired, he was hired as an "external adviser to EMC and other firms who do business with the Defense Ministry." Unfortunately, Israeli’s Defense Ministry stopped its corruption investigation "due to fears it would harm Israel-U.S. ties."

The Haaretz report also revealed that the IDF had "various problems" with the EMC system it purchased in 2002. These "technical problems made it difficult to analyze intelligence" during what the IDF called "Operation Defensive Shield," which was Israel’s largest military operation in the West Bank since the Six-Day War of 1967. "It took 24 hours," Haaretz reported, "to correct the problems and restore the intelligence systems to working order." Despite this, "the IDF continued to work with EMC, and over the next few years the firm won several other contracts for data storage systems worth tens of millions of dollars."

One such EMC contract with the IDF began in 2006, the year of Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon. Israel’s Globes business paper said that this three-year, US$30-million contract was "the largest [data] storage systems contract in Israel." Then, in 2010, the IDF awarded a storage-system contract to EMC and its competitor-cum-partner, NetApp. (See NetApp in table "CPP Investments.") This five-year contract was worth between US$100-$120 million.

In December 2011, EMC won a contract to provide a "unified infrastructure to serve the diverse document management and archiving requirements" of "all ministries and offices" of the Israeli government. EMC says this "project is considered to be one of the most strategic cross government tenders issued by the government in Israel in recent years."

EMC also services Israel’s military through its subsidiary, VMWare, which produces virtualization software. (See VMWare in table "CPP Investments.")

EMC’s "Security Division," RSA Security, provides an "advanced access control system" called SecurID. It "is the top and most popular Strong Authentication system in Israel" for "verifying user identity." SecurID is used by the Israeli Police. Other Israeli clients using this EMC product are Amdocs, Comverse and Cellcom. (See pp.5-6, pp.43-47 and pp.17-18.) Other EMC clients include Israel Discount Bank, MIRS (Motorola), Nice Systems and Pelephone. (See Israel Discount Bank, MIRS (Motorola), Nice Systems and Pelephone in table "CPP Investments.")

Business Week’s online "Executive Profiles" reveals the Israeli military and intelligence backgrounds of some EMC executives. For example, Doron Kempel, the former Vice President and General Manager for EMC’s Media Solutions Group, had previously "served in multiple command roles as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces."

And then there’s Gili Raanan, who "spent nine years at the Israeli Intelligent Corps" and "recently served as a Vice President of Strategy at EMC Corp." During his more than 10 years with the "Israeli government in several key innovative software projects,…he was awarded the Israel Security Presidential Award in 1996 and the Israeli Defense Forces Innovation award in 1992." Raanan was also a Senior Product Manager at Amdocs.

2010 Form 10-K, EMC Corporation
www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/790070/000119312511050151/d10k.htm

Shmulik Shelah, "EMC leads $15m round for Varonis," Globes, January 22, 2009.
www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000419282