I don’t usually talk EMC products in this blog, unless it’s a product I’m working directly with, or it lets me tell an interesting story. In this case, it’s the latter.
I got an email last week from Craig Librett, whose name you might recognize from RMSG’s new blog. He wanted to let me know about the announcement being made today about EMC Smarts Server Manager. Since I don’t do much work with Smarts, at first I filed it in my “read this later” category (sorry Craig). But when I looked back at it and saw that it was a big step forward in managing the “virtualized data center”, a little light went off in my head. I had just heard Chris Gahagan’s Q1’09 All-Hands call, and I remembered that exact phrase being used in talking about some long-term strategic direction.
Then some other pieces started to click together. I saw a twitter user (@dvellante) covering the EMC Strategic Forum, and he seemed pretty interested in where EMC and VMware were going. He wrote about it here, calling it EMC’s “big bet.”
Like him, I’m excited by what I’m seeing. At EMC World last year I was blown away by VMware’s presentation and vision, and I’m still impressed whenever I hear them talk about where they are trying to take the market. But I’m not just excited by the technology, I’m excited by the way the word is getting out.
In real time, analysts, customers, employees, partners, and competitors all were able to talk about EMC’s vision at the same time it was being discussed between Tucci, Maritz, and those in attendance. Later in the day I get an email with the slides from that presentation, so I can see what the analysts saw. In an unrelated thread, I get an email from the Smarts team, asking if I want to get involved in their launch, even though I work on a different product. Their press release links to a new page on EMC, which includes the text from an unofficial blog created by a few team members in RMSG.
It’s amazing to watch things flow like this.
Like I said, I don’t often talk about our products. But sometimes things come together in a way that surprises me. This isn’t just about EMC and VMware having a solid product strategy, it’s about the new way people are doing business and talking about doing business. I’m excited to be a part of it.
2 comments ↓
wow this is indeed an interesting story.
David – I agree, product talk is generally less interesting than how to apply technologies to business. There’s much going on right now in products, technologies, organizations, M/A possibilities, the economy, geo-politics, social technology, etc and the confluence of these trends is pretty fascinating isn’t it?