Tech Expectations

A deeper look at disruptive business and personal technology

Tag Archives: AWS

Photo by r2Hox


by Leave a comment

2015 Data storage market review: continued disruption by flash, SDS, and cloud

(Updated 3/23 – version 3)

Twinstrata, Maginatics, and Amplidata get acquired. Riverbed exits the storage business. DataGravity and Primary Data launch. HGST and Seagate continue to move into the systems business. Nutanix, SimpliVity, Cleversafe, and Scality form alliances with the global systems vendors like Dell, HP, and Cisco. Microsoft opens up their Office 365 ecosystem to other cloud storage providers like Dropbox. Qumulo and several stealth companies are continuing to raise millions of dollars and not telling us what they are doing. Box goes public (finally), the first cloud storage company to do so, and continues to trip up like Mr. Bean. Veritas, arguably the granddaddy of software-defined storage, returns as its own company. Storage unicorns run amok with SimpliVity just joining the club. And this year, we’ll finally get a look at Amazon Web Services financials instead of just clever guessing. Ho hum, just another few months in the data storage market. Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

An open letter to Ginni Rometty and IBM

letters

Ginni,

Last week, we presented a counterpoint to the recent negative press on IBM. I’ll take it a step further. I believe that IBM is actually the vendor that is closest to providing “Enterprise Cloud.” But what is sold, how it is sold, and the vision of the end result still needs a lot of work.

I’ve both competed against IBM at EMC and worked with IBM as a partner. When competing, our fear was getting maneuvered by IBM out of the deal when they went right to the CxO. When partnering with IBM, I was frankly surprised and disappointed at the fumbling. As a shareholder, I would have been livid.

  • Because of internal turf issues, IBM reps got stuck on whether to propose product, services, or cloud instead of focusing on what the customer wanted
  • Because differentiated core technologies like GPFS were positioned as products instead of part of a strategy and delivery model, they lost in feature-to-feature comparisons
  • There were repeatedly missed opportunities for leadership, where the customer was looking for a new vision of computing, blending attributes of traditional enterprise technology with the cloud – instead, the customer got generic positioning (or worse, marketing-speak)

I have three recommendations to address these issues.

Continue reading →


by 3 Comments

IBM has the access to beat AWS, Google, and others at Enterprise Cloud

IBM's access card to the Global 500

There’s a recent survey by IDC in which the vast majority of enterprise respondents name IBM as the vendor able to most effectively provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Surprisingly (sort of), the megascale public cloud providers, Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services come in 5th, 6th and 7th respectively. As a former AWS employee and cloud analyst who firmly believes that a public cloud with essentially unlimited scale, relentless consistency and automated metered service is the “real” cloud, I generally agree with the sentiment that the old line IT companies like IBM and HP have fallen way behind. But from a business strategy and perception viewpoint, it might be a different story.

Continue reading →


by 4 Comments

Data storage market overview: State of the market in 2014

(updated 5/15/14)

Data storage is a massive market ($22.5 billion for the 2013 high end storage market alone), and has reached a critical point in its evolution, highlighted by dramatic changes in base technologies, interfaces, and service models. EMC’s recent acquisition of DSSD was another thought-provoking data point.

Continue reading →