Chuck's Blog

The Future Is Here

Those of us who speak on IT topics often find ourselves waxing poetic about the future of technology, or the future of the data center, or something similar.

We wave our hands, and talk about what could be.

What happens when the future is here?

Do we immediately acknowledge that entirely new things are possible and set off in new directions, or do we as human beings take a considerable period to adapt to our new circumstances?

For the last few months, I've been focused almost entirely on private cloud concepts, and the alliance of VMware, Cisco and EMC that has formed to accelerate the adoption of these fully virtualized IT environments that form the basis of private clouds.

I don't think anyone is really arguing that much with what I'm saying.  But changing our thinking and our actions is going to take a while, it seems ...

EMC 2009 Strategic Forum -- Joe Tucci's Final Thoughts

Sorry for the gap in the posts.  I'll use the usual excuse -- it's been busy. 

Really, really busy -- but in a good way.

Fortunately, I've been able to squeeze out enough time to finish out the sequence from this event from March 10th. 

If you need the prequel, please see Joe Tucci's intro, the storage discussion, comments on protection, intelligence and automation, Joe's introduction of the private cloud, Paul's discussion on vSphere, and his thoughts on the vCloud and vClient initiatives.

In this segment, we'll wrap up with some final thoughts from Joe Tucci on EMC's newest business unit -- the Cloud Infrastructure Group.

EMC 2009 Strategic Forum -- Paul Maritz Part 2

I had to take a break from my sequence of posts recapping this event on March 10th, what with Cisco's UCS launch, and the whole IBM/Sun thing. 

But I'm back to the task at hand. 

Why? 

So many important and interesting concepts came out at this event that I'm committed to keep working through the sequence -- it was a treasure trove of advanced IT thinking, and deserves wider exposure.

The last post covered the first half Paul Maritz' take on VMware's strategy.  So much was said that I had no hope doing it all justice in a single post -- even a very long one.

So, let's get back into the flow from Paul Maritz.

EMC 2009 Strategic Forum -- Paul Maritz and VMware - Part 1

We're continuing a sequence of posts recapping key themes and ideas from this event (targeted to investment and industry analysts) on March 10th.

Many important highlights, one of which was the sheer pleasure of listening to Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware, present his vision and strategy to this important audience.

Paul is one of those must-see industry speakers.  If you ever have a chance to hear him stretch out on his favorite topics, make the effort to go see him.

And this time, he did not disappoint -- even going farther than the material he shared at the recent VMworld in Cannes.

EMC 2009 Strategic Forum -- Private Cloud

Continuing on our post sequence from the past few days, Joe Tucci's last topic -- and perhaps the most major one -- is how he and Paul Maritz firmly believed enterprise IT would evolve over the next few years into a "private cloud" model.

Note: for regular readers of this blog, the ideas presented here are pretty much the same as my previous posts on the same topic.

But it was awfully good to hear Joe and Paul stand in front of a large room of financial and industry analysts, and spend a good hour on the topic -- it's that important.

And when Paul started his presentation following Joe, it smoothly picked up where Joe left off.

EMC 2009 Strategic Forum -- Protection, Intelligence, Automation

Continuing on previous posts, we're recapping EMC's recent "Strategic Forum", held March 10th in Boston where Joe Tucci and Paul Maritz laid out both EMC's and VMware's strategy to large audience of financial and industry analysts.

I've already covered Joe's opening remarks, and his storage discussion. 

Today, I thought I'd run through the combined topics of protection, intelligence and automation before getting into the more beefy cloud discussions that dominated the day.

Feedback from the event continues to be extremely positive from those who attended.  In case you want to watch the whole event (long, but useful), you can see the recorded webcast here.

EMC 2009 Strategic Forum -- Storage

Continuing on a previous post from our recent event, I thought I'd use this post to recap the main points that Joe Tucci shared with the audience as part of his executive keynote. 

Joe Tucci just hit a few highlights in his session -- spending far more time on introducing private cloud concepts (along with Paul Maritz). 

The bulk of the storage-related strategy detail was handled by Dave Donatelli in a private breakout session.

But I think it's useful to cover how Joe teed it up, and the key points he emphasized from the podium.

EMC 2009 Strategic Forum -- Intro

For the last week or so, I've been engaged helping us get ready for a pretty big event -- our recent EMC Strategic Forum. 

We invited a significant number of institutional investors and industry analysts to a day-long session where we laid out EMC's overall strategy in a fair amount of detail.

If you're looking for "big thoughts" from EMC at this event, there were plenty to be had. 

So many, in fact, that I will probably end up writing at least a dozen or more posts as a result of this event.

Part of the event was webcast -- you can find the link here.  Warning: it's long -- 2 hours -- but if you really want to get a sense of where EMC and VMware are heading, it might be worth your time.

In this post, I thought I'd recap some of Joe's opening remarks, and add a bit of my own personal color.