{"id":3156,"date":"2011-01-28T17:51:52","date_gmt":"2011-01-28T17:51:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/?p=3156"},"modified":"2011-01-28T17:51:52","modified_gmt":"2011-01-28T17:51:52","slug":"emc-summit-on-cloud-storage-big-data-and-developers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/emc-summit-on-cloud-storage-big-data-and-developers\/","title":{"rendered":"EMC Summit: On Cloud, Storage, Big Data and Developers"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Last week I went to EMC\u2019s EMEA Analyst Summit at my favourite London conference venue- Kings Place in Kings Cross. As a software guy I tend to focus on SpringSource and VMware, rather than the storage mothership, but I have been around long enough to know EMC pretty well. I like to take a historical view on the IT business, because context is everything. Something that struck me really clearly is that in many respects nothing has changed in terms of narratives, strategy and remorseless execution. EMC is even still arguing that tape is dead.<\/p>\n

It seems like every computing revolution drives storage volumes, which drives EMC\u2019s bottom line. Back in the 1990s EMC talked about the tail wagging the dog \u2013 with storage becoming a bigger market than servers. But everything drives storage. Virtualisation drives storage (which helps explain both the rationalisation, and the huge success, of EMC\u2019s VMware acquisition. The cloud drives storage. Big Data drives storage (obviously). Data Center consolidation drives storage. The Web drives storage.<\/p>\n

And that bottom line. What a bottom line. EMC just turned in its fifth record quarter in a row. Arguably EMC sailed pretty close to the wind from a market disclosure perspective, given the theme of the event was Record Breaking\u2026 just a week before EMC reported yet another storming set of numbers. In Q4 2010, EMC’s consolidated revenue was $4.9 billion, an increase of 19 percent from the year-ago quarter. Compare and contrast with Cisco \u2013 another firm you\u2019d expect would benefit from many of the same trends driving EMC growth- I mean networks and storage grow in lockstep, right? Apparently not \u2013 Cisco has had a tougher downturn \u2013 missing forecasts, and hitting \u201cair pockets\u201d.<\/p>\n

At EMC though there is apparently no such turbulence to report, although of course questions remain about future growth- with EMC giving the standard answer for Elder Companies- future growth will come from the mid-market.<\/p>\n

If one single thing screamed out at me during the two day summit it was the utter seriousness with which EMC views Amazon as a competition. This should be no surprise- EMC was mentioning Amazon in 10-k filings while other major enterprise vendors had never even heard of AWS. EMC executives repeatedly dinged what they called \u201cthe bookstore\u201d. For example:<\/p>\n

“Amazon is clearly being subsidised by the bookstore at some level.”\u00a0\u2013 EMC CEO Joe Tucci.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Funnily enough Tucci then went on to explain how EMC\u2019s Mozy backup business gave EMC a better volume story. Well if you do plan to compete with one of the best retailers on the planet you better have volume in place.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe buy more disc than anyone else on the planet. Our cost structure is based on cost of storage\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Big Data<\/strong><\/p>\n

EMC is looking at workloads such as gene sequencing, geophysical exploration, media editing. It recently acquired GreenPlum, a massively parallel processing engine, built on commodity hardware \u2013 to accelerate its go to markets in Big Data. In terms of engagement models and vertical industry skills and experience EMC may lag IBM, but certainly not in terms of ambition. I would be very surprised if EMC didn\u2019t quickly make a number of software and services acquisitions to bulk up there, adding to EMC Consulting. Because at least as far as the enterprise is concerned Big Data is all about domain knowledge. Thus for example, in rail transport Big Data can be used to lower operational maintenance costs \u2013 by tracking the roundness of wheels. Seriously- over time wheels go out of round, and become a little oblong, which lowers fuel efficiency, and increases stress on the track. IBM SVP Steve Mills totally owns this story when he tells it to customers and influencers. You see for IBM Big Data is a facet of a broader Smarter Planet play, while at EMC its a market in its own right.<\/p>\n

A little surprising was that in talking to Elie Simon, GreenPlum\u2019s EMEA general manager, it became clear he is sceptical about in-memory processing of Big Data. This seems a little short-sighted. Flash SSD, Nearline Disc, In memory, and yes even tape- are all going to be part of the Big Data processing landscape going forward. Check out SAP\u2019s High Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA<\/a>), for example. But Simon doesn\u2019t lack aggression:<\/p>\n

“I dont believe that analytics workloads belong on the enterprise data warehouse”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Where is the Developer?<\/strong><\/p>\n

EMC is all about selling to ops. But to succeed big in Big Data EMC will need to address not only more Line of Business folks, but also software developers. Luckily it has SpringSource in the arsenal for that. It also doesn\u2019t have any direct relational database revenues to protect, so it can get busy with the noSQL wave. I wrote up VMware\u2019s alternative database play here – VMware\u2019s SpringSource Redis and Rabbit acquisitions: A Database Play is Emerging<\/a>. If you\u2019re more interested in a customer view check out this write up about how the Guardian is offloading workloads from Oracle to more modern data architectures – The Guardian: NoSQL EU. Don\u2019t Melt The Database<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Because make no mistake\u00a0\u2013 the cloud is all about developers (it certainly has been driven by them do far). With that mind its interesting that EMC CEO Joe Tucci said:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are two kinds of service providers – those that wont buy from us- google, microsoft, amazon, and then classic, evolving – telcos, hosters, outsourcers, pure plays that will, making EMC the platform of choice for service providers who share our vision.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

EMC\u2019s goal is \u201cto be the undisputed leader in enabling cloud computing in service providers and enterprises\u201d<\/p>\n

Records, Records, Records<\/strong><\/p>\n

Record quarters is impressive, but I was perhaps less impressed by the fact EMC claimed\u00a0last week was the largest product launch in the storage business\u2019s history: 41 new products. Why? Because it felt responsive\u00a0\u2013 IBM Storage\u2019s big claim of 2010 was that it had undertaken a \u201ccomplete refresh of the portfolio\u201d. Seems EMC didn\u2019t want to be seen as less revolutionary. To be fair some of the new products look solid, and more on that next week. In summary EMC is going great guns, and is well positioned for future group. It needs to get closer to developers- but it has some of the necessary pieces in place to do just that. See SpringSource Code2Cloud<\/a>, which is being adopted by the same customers choosing VCE.<\/p>\n

But Big Data- that is a record any storage company wants to listen to. In case you’re wondering the photo is of a big ball of tape.<\/p>\n

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Last week I went to EMC\u2019s EMEA Analyst Summit at my favourite London conference venue- Kings Place in Kings Cross. As a software guy I tend to focus on SpringSource and VMware, rather than the storage mothership, but I have been around long enough to know EMC pretty well. I like to take a historical<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[410,416,419,309,347],"class_list":["post-3156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cloud","tag-cloud","tag-emc","tag-ibm","tag-redis","tag-springsource"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wfjh-OU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}