When I'm sitting on the bus either on the way to work or on the way home, often funny little ideas/questions pop into my head. I was thinking about Atmos, what it means, where EMC are going etc and then this question popped into my head!
Are EMC serious about the cloud? Well, doh! Sure they are, just look at all Chuck's blogs entries, thought provoking, well written; plenty of food for the old grey matter there and surely he wouldn't be wasting time posting on a subject if EMC weren't serious about it? And then there's Atmos, Cloud Optimised Storage no less. And of course, there's the ongoing investment in VMware and VMware are big on cloud. So why the question?
If EMC were really serious about the cloud, why aren't they building their own? They talk about lowering the bar to allow people to go up against Amazon, the Mighty Goo etc. But why not EMC? Why don't they build a cloud? Why don't they take on the big boys? Why aren't they building a services organisation to take on the best? Surely they've got the smarts? They've got Smarts for sure, a great management platform; they've got ADM, they can tell you what you are running and what talks to what etc, great analysis tool for building and moving Web 2.0 applications around the place? They've got the best possible relationship with VMware, a good relationship with Cisco (who maybe building their own blades) and there is the ongoing relationship with Dell.
So all the pieces are there to build a cloud; so EMC, why don't you? If you are really serious, you would. So are you serious or are you just hedging your bets a bit? No problem either way, just makes you think….
p.s apologies if this is a bit of an EMC week…I'll post about something different tomorrow (I think!)
I didn’t “go there” in my Atmos analysis, but I’m wondering about the (potential) relationship between Atmos and Fortress, EMC’s semi-secret cloud services. I think they are building themselves a cloud…
So do I and if they aren’t, I’m intrigued as to why not. I’d like to know what they are using Atmos for internally; I like vendors to eat their own dog-food!
I’m sure they are. They acquired Mozy and I’m sure they will be migrating that service over to Atmos if they haven’t already. I can’t see that system built on Symms or Clariions.
They just haven’t gone public yet. They’ll wait until someone says it doesn’t work and they’ll point to Mozy and say ‘well, it works for Mozy” which has 850,000 subscribers (supposedly)