Very true, JDN. In the ultra-conservative glass houses, reliability and service may ultimately be EMC's ace cards. Aside from being a steadily recurring revenue stream, services are also valuable selling points that can mean the difference between closing a deal or not.
At the end of the day, all these technology gizmos have to sell. Each sale gets added up on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly bases. And we slice and dice these numbers to tell us if sales are slowing down, plateauing or accelerating.
Each sale comes with a pitch. The basic EMC pitch is very unique and tough to beat. And it starts with this...
We are EMC. We sell indestructible storage that will work with your old, legacy mainframe/servers/computers and whatever computing paradigm you want to use in the future. Because we only sell indestructible storage, we will never sell you a processor upgrade cycle that you don't need
As EMC's numbers show, anybody who sells a processor upgrade cycle alongside the storage upgrade cycle can't match this pitch.
Sun claims that they sell 80-90% of every storage subsystem sold with Starfire. EMC claims they get 50%. Company propaganda vs company propaganda. I'm inclined to go with EMC's claim not only because they were the first to do this but also because Sun's PR has over the years earned an 80% discount rate with me.
After all, and setting Linux, Java, Jini and Symbian aside, just how fast and how far can a revolution a minute company like Sun go when they don't have the bond that a single platform like Wintel has developed with its users or the bond that a platform-independent company like EMC has developed with the most conservative and most lucrative market in IT -- a market where IBM, which used to own this market, is the preferred non-EMC source?
That's why as the frequency of these EMC-killer type of announcements increase in 1999, the year of Fibre Channel, I'm going to reduce each one to the basic sale.
It's tough to beat EMC's basic pitch. |
