No matter what you do, there's always a strong incentive to do what's expedient, as opposed to taking a more thoughtful approach. For example, everyone has good intentions when putting their IT environments together, but it's so easy to get lost in the moment.
The distractions can be plentiful and tempting: feeling bound by legacy decisions, a vendor offering a too-good-to-be-true deal, perhaps a shiny technology bauble that distracts.
We're starting to have far more engagements with customers and partners around end-to-end fully virtualized environments, rather than just individual piece-parts.
And some of them are willing to share their results.
The distractions can be plentiful and tempting: feeling bound by legacy decisions, a vendor offering a too-good-to-be-true deal, perhaps a shiny technology bauble that distracts.
We're starting to have far more engagements with customers and partners around end-to-end fully virtualized environments, rather than just individual piece-parts.
And some of them are willing to share their results.
It's All About The Customer
EMC does so many great things with so many IT organizations -- I could spend every day sharing the stories. But most companies are unwilling to issue public releases about their successes for a variety of reasons: confidentiality, perception of risk, and so on.
Recently, we've been fortunate to have two of our valued customers -- Health Quest and TTX Company -- share their results by turning to EMC -- not just for individual products -- but an end-to-end outcome.
No surprise, but the people who put these press releases together have some latitude about which parts of the story should be emphasized, and there's a strong data protection theme in both.
But there's more behind the story.
Health Quest
The healthcare industry in the US is structured very differently than other countries. The predominate delivery model seems to be an affiliated approach where several co-located hospitals and clinics band together to share various services, including IT.
Within this vertical, you'll frequently find some extremely sharp and progressive IT organizations. This particular group was the first to embrace virtualization of servers, the first to embrace things like object storage, and is likely to be the first to go "all in" on mobile user experiences.
I don't know if it's perspective bias on my part, but all of these folks seem to be grappling with the same underlying issue: information growth is downright explosive. We toss around industry numbers of 60% or so for average information growth; I routinely meet people in this segment who are experiencing 300% or more on an annual basis.
The information has to be widely shared to be valuable (think multiple healthcare professionals collaborating around a patient's information base) yet must be rigorously protected for privacy and confidentiality (think HIPAA).
The press release talks about both our virtualization and data protection engagement (led by EMC Consulting), but I know there's far more to the story than that. Only so much you can put in a press release, you know.
What I like about this segment is that it's basically made up of smart, caring professionals providing important healthcare services, and the mountains information they need to do their job. That makes IT's role very clear indeed.
TTX Company
I love these guys because they've got a "cloud" business model, except it's transportation infrastructure rather than IT infrastructure. They manage an on-demand pool of rail cars with a pay-per-use model -- different classes of services, different SLAs, etc. You'd be amazed at the structural similarities between their well-established world of physical transportation, and all the discussions currently going on in IT land around cloud and service provider business models.
And you thought all this IT cloud stuff was really new?
Take one step back, and their business depends on real-time information: what assets, where are they, who's using them, where's the extra capacity, etc. etc. There's also a strong demand for after-the-fact analytics as predictors of future trends.
Basically, they're largely in the information business -- so IT's role is very clear indeed.
If you dig through the press release, please note that (a) they're coming off a mainframe environment, and (b) say that they're 98% virtualized. Their workloads tend to be more scale-out than scale-up, which is why I think they went with CLARiiON CX for primary storage.
Note the emphasis on having to re-engineer their data protection environment -- it had to be at least as robust as the mainframe they were coming off of.
They Didn't Get There By Accident
There are many, many companies we meet that are almost complete virtualized. Yes, they saved money in the process, but they're also delivering better IT services, and are far more responsive to new business requirements.
They did not get where they are today by accident.
Every one of these companies had a vision and a plan. And, in each case, EMC earned the right to help with more than just a single product -- we took responsibility for the outcome.
I see so many discussions out there that are essentially big distractions for people trying to make a similar journey. Many of these are led by vendors who essentially have only one thing to sell, so they have to make it all about their thing.
Helps the vendor, doesn't help the customer much IMHO.
No one gets to a next-generation IT environment by accident :-)
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