Service Provider Insider

Live From London: The EMC EMEA SP Summit

It was a good week last week.  I was fortunate enough to help out at EMC's first-ever EMEA service provider summit.  Many thanks to Richard Bradbury and his team for a wonderful event.

For those of you who are interested in the whole IT-as-a-service provider thing, I wanted to recap a few key learnings for those who couldn't attend.

The Interesting Dynamics Of "Trading Up"

"The legacy" is the 800 pound gorilla that's at the core of any serious enterprise IT transformation discussion.  

People want to move forward, but what about the legacy?

I've now met more than a few service providers that are currently impaled on the horns of this exact same dilemna that their traditional enterprise IT brethren face.

They understand their existing model quite well -- pros and cons.  But, at the same time, there's a growing realization that a new model is needed -- one that isn't a mere variation on the existing theme.

And, as I watch these discussions unfold, it's less about vendors like EMC, and more abou overall business strategy -- especially if we're considering a growing and thriving SP.

Do Service Providers Have A Real Scale Advantage?

If you follow the buzz around all things cloud, you've seen the "scale" argument in different forms: cloud operators will win in the long term simply because they have economies of scale.

And then the author will invariably point at compute, or power, or some other commoditized economic input as evidence of the cloud model's inherent advantage over traditional IT.

Well, I beg to differ.

Yes, I think there's an inherent 'scale' advantage that service providers have in their favor.  But it has little to do with things like compute, storage, data centers, etc.

It has to do with people and process.

Reconsidering Storage As A Service

Yes, this is a blog about service providers, and -- yes -- I work for EMC, so it's inevitable that sooner or later we'd get around to this topic in one form or another.

But it's not going to be the usual shameless product plug, although I'll be happy to indulge you if that's what you're looking for.

No, this post offers up some thoughts about newer approaches that I see evolving for delivering storage-as-a-service as an underpinning for a variety of SP business models.

Why Service Providers Like Vblocks

OK, the VCE coalition started shipping real-deal Vblocks at the beginning of this year.  The Vblock keeps getting better and better -- new features, new configs, etc.  It's moving fast.

As we sit here in May, I've noticed two things:

1 -- there's a lot of demand for Vblocks, and
2 -- service providers are demanding more than their fair share

I've been thinking about why this is, and have some observations I'd like to bounce off you.

The Secret Of Standardization

Just about everyone in IT will give the concept of "standardization" lip service, but for service providers, it's part of what sets them apart from ordinary enterprise IT, traditional outsourcers, system integrators, et. al.

Despite everyone's intellectual acknowledgement that standardization is generally a good thing, it turns out to be a hard thing to excel at -- simply because there are so many pragmatic forces at work to create the IT equivalent of entropy in large settings.

However, if you're an SP, a well-thought-out philosophy towards standardization is a key part of any successful business model.  Otherwise, you're just another data center with a chaotic pile of gizmos.