Mike Ruettgers is unmoved: "I don't see it. The equipment will continue to get better, but whenever you put these things together, it gets pretty complex. Most customers don't have the time or the expertise to do it themselves." Indeed, Ruettgers turns the competition's argument inside out: The storage landscape is shifting so rapidly, he claims, that great service -- and the window it opens to the needs and habits of the companies that use the technology -- will become even more important going forward.

There's intriguing evidence to support his argument: EMC has become so proficient at solving its customers' problems, so prepared to do whatever it takes, that more and more customers are calling EMC to help fix problems that aren't even caused by its products. And EMC is prepared to tackle those problems too -- in accordance with a principle it calls "guilty until proven innocent."

The principle works like this: J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. was having a problem with a big database just before New Year's. The bank does millions of transactions every day, which requires a ton of computer hardware and software, but it appeared as if the problem originated with the EMC machines where the data is stored. When Chase called, EMC began its drill of breaking the problem down and re-creating it in the lab. After 12 hours, all signs pointed to a piece of software in the IBM computers that run the databases. It was a huge investment of time and resources -- only to find that the problem originated with someone else's equipment.

What did EMC do next? It didn't send a bill to Chase. Instead, EMC's customer-service and engineering teams called their counterparts at IBM in Austin, Texas to share the information that they gathered, which helped IBM resolve the problem more quickly.

Needless to say, customers love that kind of treatment. In fact, they love it so much that more than 20% of the problems tackled by EMC wind up originating with some other company's equipment. Is that a cost or an opportunity? Does EMC get credit for its efforts, or does it foot the bill for its competition? "I'm not that sure we get a direct payback," says Ruettgers. "But it's part of our philosophy. We have a deep belief that if you provide good service to customers, you will, in fact, get rewarded for it -- even though it's hard to measure."

Paul C. Judge (pjudge@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor.

Sidebar: The Customer-Service Agenda

Who: Nigel Alderson
What: Weekly change-control process
Why: To maximize flexibility and to minimize errors with on-site product upgrades

Nigel Alderson, 47, oversees the most ticklish part of EMC's customer-service operation: the 1,800 changes that get made each week to EMC systems in the field. The vast majority of those upgrades are performed at the same time -- in the dead of night on Saturdays, about the only time that big customers can do without access to their crucial data.

The process of getting ready for Saturday used to begin with a six-hour conference call on Thursday, known as "change-control day." District service managers dialed in to the war room in Hopkinton, where Alderson and his team sat with stacks of paper that listed every job scheduled for the coming weekend. Each report included a list of planned steps, regardless of how seemingly simple. The six people in the room would go through each item, line by line, each asking the same question: What could go wrong? On about 6 out of every 10 jobs, Alderson's team flagged issues that had to be answered by noon on Friday for the process to move forward.

As EMC has grown over the past five years, the conference call dragged on, sometimes for as long as 18 mind-numbing hours. So Alderson's team has automated the change-control process and moved it to the Web. Instead of filing a piece of paper with the folks in the Hopkinton war room, customer engineers now log on to a Web site and complete an online form.

The payoff from all of this work? Back in 1995, when EMC initiated the change-control process, field engineers were getting it right about 75% of the time. Today, Alderson claims a success rate of 99.5%. The goal is 100%, according to Alderson. "Do the math," he says. "Today, 5 to 10 changes that we make fall short and affect customers in some way. In our business, that's unacceptable."