So Atmos Online has become Atmos Offline; well, okay, not quite yet but it's on the way to becoming so. There does appear to be alot of spinning going on from EMC about precisely what Atmos Online was and that is to be expected but it's really okay to try something and fail, it really is. I don't think EMC need to lick their wounds too much on this and I suspect they have learnt quite a lot from the experience i.e being a Service Provider is actually quite hard.
But it beggars another question, I wonder how well the other EMC Atmos based services are doing and how much traction they are getting against S3? It's funny, many of EMC's competitors in the storage world talk about EMC as some kind of marketing behemoth but in the competition for mindshare and getting traction in this space, they appear to be really struggling to get any kind of message out there. I suspect many EMC's competitors will also struggle to get traction against S3; so it is far too early for them to be crowing about EMC's failure as they haven't delivered anything in this space either.
Although it is still early days, it does appear at present that Amazon's S3 is really ruling the roost in this space but EMC's Atmos in a Box might help them in this space; if they bother to tell anyone about it.
AIAB may allow developers to play with Atmos and develop cool services on top of it. They could also do with getting some books written on working and developing Atmos, building a development community around Atmos might also be a good thing. EMC are not a company which immediately comes to a developer's mind when they are developing cloud-services; they need to work to change this; this is a new market for EMC to learn how to compete in.
But let's not forget that in the pile it high and sell it cheap world of consumer cloud storage, EMC have Mozy and Iomega. This combination is a service that people do want and with people like Asus offering cloud storage with their NetBooks, this is a growth market.
I wouldn't count EMC out of the public Cloud market just yet; an early knock-down doesn't necessarily mean an early knock-out. If anything, they got into the ring and tripped over their shoelaces whilst swinging for someone who was either in a different ring or not actually turned up yet.
I’m willing to take EMC at their word that this was more about removing ambiguity with their partners than it was about not being able to successfully run Atmos Online. Heck even if it was losing them significant money EMC could have afforded to keep it up and running indefinitely as a proof of concept if they felt it was in their own best interest.
This is confusing in a way. Everytime I heard someone from EMC speak about Atmosonline, it was always with the disclaimer it was a POC. You can find posts on Chad Sakac’s blog from a year ago that said this very distinctly.
I’m not sure where the notion that EMC ever intended to make a business out of this site evolved from, except from sloppy management of the site itself that is.
No matter, now its clear. As for the partners selling Atmos based solutions (ATT, Hosted Solutions, and Pier 1 – maybe others?), they seem to be doing fine.