Re: Processor-centric vs. Storage-centric
IBM has always had a mainframe-centric view of the world. Unless you've worked for them it's difficult to appreciate how ingrained this worldview is. Even though IBM has made (often painful) progress in weaning itself from mainframe sales as their profit focus, "big iron" still accounts for a huge percentage of IBM's net earnings. As the workstation and low-end server business has been eroded by Wintel, SUNW has also been forced into this view, though for political reasons they don't call their high-end iron mainframes. Make no mistake, however. SUNW's financials live and die by UE10000 sales, not Java.
As far as Shark and other erstwhile competitors go, MR was very clear in the most recent conference call that all of these offerings really operate in a different market from EMC. IBM sells storage to IBM accounts. SUNW sells storage to SUNW accounts, etc. Only EMC sells processor-neutral Enterprise Storage Networks. Your friendly IBM salesperson is trying to sell you an IBM "solution" which includes an IBM processor with that Shark. Ditto for your friendly SUNW, CPQ, or HWP salesperson. The last thing you'll hear is an IBM salesperson pushing an HWP server to go with that storage or a SUNW salesperson suggesting a CPQ server. That's why EMC is happy to "partner" with anyone. Since storage will shortly account for 75% of the budget they're happy to allow IBM, SUNW, CPQ, and HWP to squabble over the remaining 25%. |
