Storage Nation

Another fascinating example of convergence and synergy crossed my desk this morning.  The news release is fairly straightforward: " RSA Helps Global Corporations Collaborate Securely With New Release Of RSA® Data Loss Prevention Suite ".  As press releases go, it's sort of ordinary-looking material — what could possibly be exciting here? And that's exactly what I wanted to share with you ..

I was pleased to see that we just announced our most recent senior hire : Jeremy Burton who will be EMC's new CMO — chief marketing officer. I'm reasonably sure that he's going to like it at EMC.  It looks like the right person in the right position at the right time. Marketing at EMC Historically, I've always seen EMC as built on three exceptional pillars: a great product organization, a great sales organization and a great customer support organization.  Marketing, while always relevant, hasn't historically been one of the things that we could lay claim to being "best in class", simply because it typically hasn't been a top priority

For those of us in the IT business, we occasionally encounter a fundamental new enabling technology that forces us to reconsider some of our long-held notions around the way things work. I'd put server and desktop virtualization into that category, as well as the ubiquitous web.  If you're a storage person, flash has that potential as well.  If backup is your thing, the combination of dedupe and low-cost disks has changed how you think about things. In this post, I'd like to start to introduce a technology concept that — yes — has the potential to change a great deal of how we think about IT at scale.  And, yes, this is going to be a long post … Context Today, Pat Gelsinger did an important event with industry analysts.  You can see his materials and webcast here .  In addition, I wanted to offer up my views on this topic as well.  I'll be using his slide deck as a reference point

No, this is not another shameless pitch to attend yet-another-vendor show.

The headlines reads: " VMware To Acquire Certain IT Management Products and Software Expertise from EMC Corporation ". People will perceive this story one of two ways, depending on their perspective. The first (and most common) perspective will be "so what?" The second (and less frequent) perspective will be "this might be a big deal …" And I'd like a chance to share why I think this is more of the latter, and less of the former.

OK, cool contest alert. The folks at the EMC Developer Network are sponsoring their first ever EMC Monster Mash with over $25K of prize money .  Hint: that's better than a free iPod The idea is simple: go over to the EDN site and create a creative mashup of two or more EMC products using the published interfaces, combining external services as you see fit, and submit your entry. Lots of EMC platforms to choose from, storage, security, management, content, etc.  And, of course, a big world of non-EMC external services as well … Why are we doing this?  First, we've got a big world of mashable capabilities across our portfolio, and we'd like people to get more familiar with them.  Second, we think that intermixing this stuff with popular online services would be pretty interesting, and demonstrate even more powerful functionality.  Finally, we thought it'd be pretty fun.

It's most definitely an uncomfortable topic for many of the IT organizations I meet with on a regular basis. More often than not, I find myself asking how IT governance is done in their organization? And I've begun to see a very strong correlation between good governance and good IT.

So much of the IT infrastructure discussion today is focused on costs.  Paradoxically, the majority of IT time seems to be spent on the most commoditized aspect of infrastructure: hardware costs. Software costs seem to get less attention, even though they're arguably more amenable to IT negotiations.  More interestingly, improvement of operational processes seem to get almost no attention at all

So much of the IT infrastructure discussion today is focused on costs.  Paradoxically, the majority of IT time seems to be spent on the most commoditized aspect of infrastructure: hardware costs. Software costs seem to get less attention, even though they're arguably more amenable to IT negotiations.  More interestingly, improvement of operational processes seem to get almost no attention at all.

As part of my role here at EMC, I get to talk to all sorts of interesting consumers of IT: enterprises, partners — and, more recently, the more nascent category of "IT service providers". I think of service providers as a new channel for the IT industry.  Yes, we've seen outsourcers and hosters and all manner of people who will offer to run various aspects of IT on your behalf, but enough has changed recently that the whole discussion is somewhat fresh again. Given that I spend a lot of time with enterprises and more traditional partners as well, I have a pretty good sense of what people might want, and why they might want it.