StorageKilter Blog

EMC and the cloud

November 25th, 2009

by Sal Capizzi

EMC held its fall 2009 North American analyst summit on November 10^th and 11^th at its Franklin, MA facility.

As with all analyst conferences, the point is to disseminate vendor messages while getting feedback from analysts in order to avoid any missteps.  There was no mistaking EMC’s messages this time around.  The two overarching takeaways:  1) EMC is moving to the cloud; and 2) moving to the cloud is a journey.  To say that EMC emphasized the word “journey” would be an understatement. In fact, all presenters managed to pepper their respective presentations with “journey”.

In fairness, getting to a cloud-type infrastructure is journey of sorts — definitely not a short term goal, even though several cloud offerings are available today.  Although there was plenty of additional subject matter and some good detail in the suite of presentations, the common thread for all of them was support for cloud.

CEO Joe Tucci emphasized that EMC is a technology company focusing on IT infrastructure, that it will not become a services company, and that it does not plan to be in the business of selling applications.  EMC will focus on enabling its partners to deliver the applications while it focuses on the infrastructure layers.  With EMC’s reputation for providing high levels of services to its customers, it was somewhat surprising to hear that they claim not to be a services company.  But as echoed by Howard Elias, EMC’s focus for providing services is totally in support of driving its sales at the infrastructure level.

EMC emphasized the private cloud (services to end users within the organization) as opposed the public cloud (services to customers outside the organization over the Internet, e.g., Mozy).  And although cloud was certainly the common theme throughout all the presentations, EMC did a good job of putting the discussion in the right context in terms of integrating with the related, underlying technologies.  Discussions about how virtualization, backup, security, and IT management would bring real cost saving advantages to customers in a cloud delivery system were pretty convincing.  One thing that EMC does right is to frame its strategy around customer needs rather than competition.

None of this means success is a slam dunk for EMC.   It’s reasonable to predict that the delivery of IT services through the cloud will be adopted widely by SMBs and some enterprises for specific applications, but if services are not executed properly the rate of adoption will stall and some vendors will stumble.  The true test will be whether or not EMC and other vendors can actually deliver a reasonably manageable solution at real cost savings.  Nevertheless, a major vendor like EMC getting behind the push for cloud will absolutely help drive customer adoption.

Entry Filed under: Cloud storage, Storage strategies