IT specialist and Fortune 500 company EMC on Wednesday reported record financial results for the second quarter in a row. According to EMC, first-quarter consolidated revenue was $3.9 billion, an increase of 23 percent compared to one year ago, while GAAP net income rose 92 percent year-over-year.

 "EMC is off to a strong start in 2010, turning in the best first quarter in company history with record first-quarter revenue, high double-digit profit growth and all-time record free cash flow," said Joe Tucci, EMC Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "Our private cloud strategy and focus on four multi-billion dollar markets—each expected to experience rapid growth for many years to come—are resonating very well with customers. We are confident in our ability to lead the next major wave of IT, maintain a long-term double-digit revenue growth rate and continue to take share."

EMC's Information Infrastructure business was particularly robust, rising 22 percent year-over-year to settle at $3.3 billion. The company also cited strong demand and double-digit revenue growth for its Symmetrix storage product portfolio. VMware, for which EMC owns a majority stake, contributed $632 million in revenue to pot.

EMC earlier this week announced a few improvements to its Atmos cloud infrastructure solution, which is an on-premisies cloud storage platform aimed at helping customers automatically manage the distribution of rich, unstructured information across different geographic locations.

Included in the upgrades is the introduction of GeoProtect software, which EMC says offers better flexibiilty, resiliency, and content protection levels than previous versions.

EMC also beefed up the hardware side of things by upgrading to Intel's new Xeon 5500 processor series and adding higher density, 2GB disk drives. The end result, says EMC, is 50 percent better performance and a doubling of capacity.

Atmos version 1.3 and associated hardware updates sill start shipping this quarter, EMC added. 

EMC said this week it has inked a definitive agreement to purchase Kansas-based Archer Technologies, a privately held governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) software vendor.

"Traditional security management focuses primarily on addressing technology issues, but our customers are telling us that their real challenges are in the areas of policy management, audit and compliance," said Art Coviello, President, RSA, The Security Division of EMC. "You can’t manage what you can’t see. The Archer solution not only offers the visibility into risk and compliance that customers need, it brings stronger policy management capabilities to the RSA portfolio. The end result is customers are able to better manage their security programs and prove compliance across both physical and virtual infrastructures, and effectively communicate to the business."

The acquisition instantly expands EMC's GRC portfolio and enables the company to offer a broader set of IT-GRC solutions, ranging from policy orchestration and real-time security event management, EMC said.

After the deal is finalized, Archer will remain in Kansas and operate as part of EMC's security division, RSA.