Chuck's Blog

DellEMC -- Bittersweet Thoughts

Today is the day Dell officially acquires EMC. Having spent 18 years at EMC (and two at VMware), my attention keeps wandering to the topic -- and its meaning -- even though I've moved on to bigger and better things.

Maybe it's time for a little writing therapy?

We all have had plenty of time to process the single largest tech acquisition in history. Today, the combined DellEMC marketing machine is fully cranked up, blasting Happy Rays into the interwebs.

All as expected.

As most big events are a mixture of positives and negatives, this one is no exception.

Legacy Cloud?

Sometimes, you see a phrase that makes you pause and think. I tripped over this one, courtesy of Justin Warren, who was commenting on the recent VMworld announcements.

The phrase made me think. Thinking is good. Thank you, Justin.

New ideas in the IT world are bright, shiny objects that initially capture our attention. They then become utterly familiar, and the world progresses to newer, brighter and shinier things.

VMware was founded in 1998. It was acquired by EMC over 12 years ago. Next week, EMC disappears and becomes part of Dell. Life moves on. VMware has been very successful in helping to define what "private cloud" means inside a data center.

Amazon Web Services was publicly launched in 2006, a decade ago. It too has been wildly successful, and has helped to define what "public cloud" means outside of data centers.

Both can reasonably be described as "legacy", if nothing else than through age and maturity alone. Both could be described as providing infrastructure as a service, or IaaS. They also can be described as two competing industry forces attempting to capture each other's territory.

When it comes to enterprise IT, I can't make the argument that either is "winning" the IaaS wars. It appears to be a standoff, with no clear road ahead.

So, what might be next?

For Even More Reading ...

I must be getting old.  I can't remember whether I mentioned it here or not.  

I've been writing pieces for Forbes for a while now, and just realized that I've built up a decent number of articles there.

You'll note that the tone and target audience is a bit different than what I do here.  

I think some of the pieces came out pretty well, if I do say so myself :)

Chuck's articles on Forbes