Database = ORCL
That's why EMC maintains a very close working relationship with the other two "major technology companies", CSCO and ORCL, that Reuttgers talks about.
I know it's hard to believe, but the fundamental problem with processor vendors is that while they talk "total solutions" what they really want to do is sell you as many high-margin central processors as they can. Because that's where they make all their money. As a result of this inherent conflict of interest, virtually all of their storage sales wind up going to their own processor accounts. You will never see an IBM salesperson helping a customer select a CPQ server to complement a storage sale just as you'll never see a SUNW salesperson steering a customer to an IBM processor, etc.
IBM has significantly diversified itself away from the near total reliance on high-margin central processor sales it had a decade ago, so I expect that this transition will be less traumatic for them than it would have been had it occurred earlier. SUNW may well be trying to make such a transition, but I've yet to see any convincing evidence of it.
When EMC first took on IBM a decade ago, mainframe-class disk drives were hugely expensive and, in retrospect, overengineered. The RAID revolution showed that equivalent reliability could be had by ganging together large numbers of cheaper off-the-shelf drives in redundant configurations. In many ways the processor market now faces the same sort of disruption. Mainframe-class central servers are engineered for very high RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability) because their failure has catastrophic consequences for a business (consider EBAY's well-reported woes of last year). But once storage (the real critical element in enterprise IT systems) is removed from them, the result is a hugely overengineered and overpriced peripheral which can be replaced by a large array of far cheaper off-the-shelf server peripherals whose individual reliability is of less importance. This is the threat that the storage-centric IT future presents to today's central processor vendors. |
