Joe Tucci, the chief executive of storage vendor EMC gave a lecture yesterday at the University of Washington about the strategy he adopted as CEO, and the outlook of the company in terms of growth and expansion.

During his 50 minute lecture, Tucci put an emphasis on how his company is making a lot of effort to stay competitive, and noted the Boston minicomputer companies of the ‘70s and ‘80s as an example of the opposite.

“What I have noticed [is] that the companies that have done well are the companies that have played an offensive game. The companies that tended to get gobbled up in these changes and lost their way are companies that played a lot of defense to protect their current position and didn’t play enough offense.”

Tucci presented some numbers to back up his claims about how EMC is playing competitively. He said the company spends about 12 percent a year on R&D, which added up to $10.5 million from 2003 to 2010. EMC spent $14 billion on M&A during the same period, and there plans to continue investing equally large sums in the near future.

Tucci continued to talk about his company and its current position, in addition to how today the cloud and big data are the trends that are changing the market. EMC managed to establish a pretty strong foothold in these areas, thanks to among others a majority stake of VMware.

The latest development from him comes from this week, when the storage giant announced EMC’s Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Provisioning. The main highlight is tighter VMware integration for VCE. VCE is a joint venture between EMC, Cisco and VMware that provides a pre-configured cloud infrastructure offering, which will now be able to scale much more effectively.