• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Computer History / EMC’s Tough Road to the Post-Infrastructure Future

EMC’s Tough Road to the Post-Infrastructure Future

May 10, 2010 By Stephen 1 Comment

EMC is the 800 lb gorilla of the enterprise storage industry, but the company has much bigger plans. Although CEO Joe Tucci kicked off his keynote by claiming “We are an infrastructure company and proud of it,” EMC’s ambitions must go way beyond IT infrastructure. Each acquisition and strategy announcement is an attempt by EMC adapt to a fundamentally-transformed enterprise IT world.

The Non-Box Company

EMC moved out of the “box company” role in 2003, purchasing Legato Systems to move into enterprise backup software and Documentum for enterprise content management, but this was only a warm-up. Many were puzzled by the 2003 purchase of virtualization pioneer, VMware, but it has played out to be one of the shrewdest moves of the decade. Although their revenue remains small in comparison to the parent company, VMware is arguably more important today to the modern data center than EMC itself. Later purchases like System Management Arts (SMARTS), Configuresoft, and RSA further expanded EMC’s footprint.

More telling are the moves VMware has made. SpringSource, Zimbra, and GemStone add up to very much a non-infrastructure world for the “infrastructure company.” EMC is clearly moving into the application platform space, leveraging this reach to consolidate their control over the underlying infrastructure.

Moving On Up

This seems to be the real EMC vision: Move up the stack, offer a compelling IT strategy, and move tons of heavy datacenter gear. This isn’t unique; It’s a re-play of IBM’s game plan from decades past. But EMC finds itself in a moment of transformation for corporate IT: Application development teams no longer care about infrastructure, and the rest of IT must finally transform itself to keep up with their needs.

Read my thoughts on The Techie/Business Schism for more on this IT transformation

Make no mistake: IT is in the middle of a revolution, not a simple equipment transition (think mainframe-mini-micro). Rather, the new world of IT is application-centric and big enterprise iron is becoming less visible and strategic. Surely, future IT architects will be able to deploy monolithic integrated blocks or stacks (like the EMC/Cisco vBlock), but many will choose to deploy lighter scale-out systems based on commodity hardware. The choice will be made based on finance or business strategy, not technological capabilities because higher-layer software will make hardware increasingly irrelevant.

Selling the Strategy

What is an avowed infrastructure company like EMC to do? Many of their competitors are doubling down on advanced storage hardware, but the smart ones are focusing on software instead. EMC is certainly moving towards a common hardware platform differentiated by software “personality” but their strategy must go well beyond this. The company must focus on the new IT world, selling product as a foundation for the next generation of applications, not merely a “faster/better” storage box for today’s apps.

Yet it would be foolish to make a wholesale move and abandon existing systems and protocols. EMC’s revenue stream depends on continued Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NAS array sales even as they transition to systems that bear little resemblance to today’s Symmetrix or Celerra. They must develop and market a forward-looking strategy yet not abandon their cash cows.

In other words, EMC must say one thing while, for the most part, doing something entirely different. This “run the business while changing the business” challenge has been the downfall of many. The few who have successfully transitioned are the exception rather than the rule. EMC has a tough road ahead, but my conversations with company insiders at EMC World this week show that they are well aware of the challenge. This puts them well ahead of many in the storage industry, and explains my continuing focus on EMC.

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From…
  • How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier
  • Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!
  • Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply
  • Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!

Filed Under: Computer History, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT Tagged With: EMC, EMC World, Joe Tucci, strategy, vBlock, VMware

Primary Sidebar

James T. Kirk: Mr. Scott. Have you always multiplied your repair estimates by a factor of four?
Montgomery Scott: Certainly, sir. How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12

February 3, 2022

Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion

January 24, 2022

How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier

January 14, 2022

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    MacBook Users: Encrypt Your Drive with OS X FileVault! It’s Easy and Free!

    December 20, 2012

    Storage Changes in VMware vSphere 5.1

    September 4, 2012

    Thoughts on the Modern Miracle of 3D Printing

    July 28, 2015

    Storage Changes in VMware vSphere 5

    July 16, 2011

    Marketers: Fudging the Meaning of Buzzwords Matters (To You!)

    December 2, 2015

    Rocking Out With the Topping VX1 Desktop/Bookshelf Amplifier

    October 6, 2015

    How Will Cisco Recover From The Consumer Strategy Blunder?

    January 2, 2013

    Virtual Machine Mobility: Of What, and to Where and in What State?

    January 16, 2012

    The End of Unlimited Data – Part 1: The Buffet

    June 2, 2010

    Edward Snowden Is Right: We Must Protect The Internet

    March 19, 2014

    Footer

    Legalese

    Copyright © 2022 · Log in