Storage Nation

Nothing like a little M&A action to spice up a Monday, no? Today's news is rather straightforward — Dell intends to purchase 3PAR.  Not entirely a surprise if you're a close industry-watcher like I am. Some interesting commentary is starting to result (including this piece by Dave Vellante), so I thought I'd offer up some personal observations as well.

I was reading posts by Elias Khnaser and Nigel Poulton over breakfast this morning that were imploring one of EMC's historical competitors — HDS — to "open up" their company and start engaging more with the communities around them. Both Elias and Nigel are absolutely correct — and their suggestions very helpful — but opening up your company is a lot harder than it looks. Trust me on this. Companies Are Like People Companies, like people, take on unique behavioral traits based on all sorts of things: the personalities of their founders, the markets they compete in, and so on

Lots of cloud chatter this week.  A couple of good industry events.  An interesting new startup offering a cloud operating system for private clouds.  Even the ever-outspoken Werner dissing private clouds as "false clouds". A lively debate, to be sure! Time for me to offer up another attempted level-set in this discussion.  It's easy to become lost in the details, and more difficult to see what's really happening here — or, at least, what I think is happening. Disruption Is In The Air Clouds disrupt three aspects of technology: how it's built, how it's operated and how it's consumed.  Other than that, it's business as usual There's excitement in the air, but also certain degree of fear.  The deck chairs are starting to get re-arranged in the IT vendor world.  Hot winds of change are blowing through enterprise IT organizations.  And vast piles of capital are flowing into the new intermediaries — the service providers. As all of this happens, I'd encourage everyone to remember the golden rule.

I was locked away in meetings most of this week, and didn't have a chance to participate in a flurry of posts and discussions on this important topic. Scott Lowe got the latest wave going with his prognostications on a certain vendor , Marc Farley added a thoughtful post , and Chris Mellor joined in the fun , as well as Storagebod. But the topic isn't done yet — we'll be arguing this one for decades to come

Sure, most every organization spends money on IT — that much is obvious. I want to know if your organization invests in IT much the same way an investor would think about it. Why?  Because I believe that the answer to that simple question will tell me much about what kind of IT organization you are, what you expect from vendors like EMC, and — ultimately — what kind of IT organization you'll eventually be. Spending vs.

It's Friday, it's been a good week, but I still have one more blog post left in me. The reason I've chosen to spend some time exploring the latest IDC results is simple: in a very competitive part of the IT game, IDC is the de-facto scorekeeper.  I used to offer up blog commentary every quarter, but stopped doing it since nothing interesting was happening. Not the case this time around. Things appear to be changing in the storage biz ..

Over the past few months, I've been progressively migrating to what I call the "fat browser" model for my day-to-day computing tasks.  If it ain't running in a browser, I don't want to use it, or at least use less of it. My experience so far?  Pretty good in most areas, just a few legacy areas to sort through.  And I think that — one we move beyond virtualizing legacy desktops — more people will come to appreciate the fat browser model as their preferred client experience. What Is A Fat Browser? For me, it's best exemplified by something like an iPad, or a netbook, or perhaps a smartphone.  Your browser is your primary UI.  There's always good connectivity, whether it be wifi or 3G/4G.  There are a few local applets and local information stores on the device if needed — nothing important, though.

OK, you're probably wondering (a) what in the world could possibly motivate me to start a new blog in addition to this one, and (b) who would ever want to read more of my blather? Well, over the last few months I've been working intently with a group of people I'll call "IT as a service" service providers.  We've historically called them outsourcers, hosters, SaaS, managed services, etc.

The news coming out of SAPPHIRE this morning is fairly compelling to many of us. SAP is publicly endorsing the private cloud model, the VCE coalition and the Vblock infrastructure package.  They've highlighted the work that the VCE coalition (together with Accenture) has done to validate and benchmark a real-world SAP environment from Levi Strauss. This announcement is in addition to the recent EMC Information Intelligence Group's tie-up in the content management and workflow space, covered here and here — a big piece of news in its own right. And, predictably, there are a lot of interesting angles to the SAP and VCE story — some obvious, some a bit more subtle ..

Was a great EMC World – I hope our customers enjoyed it, learned things, and gave us feedback on what they wanted next.   So much stuff – won’t recap them but simply say that we showed how we are delivering on every step of the journey our customers find themselves on.