As consumers, we all benefit from choice. We can buy what we want, when we want and where we want. In general, more choices are good thing.
OK, maybe it's a bit outrageous when you go to the supermarket and there's an entire aisle with nothing but hundreds of different choices for bottled drinking water -- but you get the idea: choice is a good thing.
So I think that explains a concern I'm hearing more and more from customers -- are EMC's acquisitions limiting my choices?
The simple answer is "no", but I think it's worth a post to explain why this is, and -- if anything -- gives customers more choices, and not less.
I've used the phrase "stack fear" to describe the concern. People see EMC buying up interesting technologies at a good clip -- building a "stack" -- and are worried that
(a) if I buy one part of the stack, will I be forced in to buying others? and
(b) I'm using this technology in a certain way, will EMC screw it up so it doesn't work in my environment any more?
Choice is good
My strong opinion is that it would be wildly illogical and unprofitable to pursue either course. If we did, we'd be fired -- first by our customers, and then by our (potentially new) management.
The first rule we have is don't break what you bought. Most of these companies (VMware, Documentum, Legato, RSA, et. al.) were very successful companies in their own right when we acquired them. If we were to limit their functionality, or restrict their use in some way, we'd be destroying a significant part of their value. Csutomers and shareholders would not be pleased, to say the least.
The second rule is freedom of choice. If I buy a Sony CD, I don't expect to have to buy a Sony CD player. If I buy a Toyota, I'm not looking for Toyota-branded gas to put in my car. And -- heaven forbid -- anyone tries to have one choice force another, it'd be doom for both.
Same thing applies to IT stacks. One choice shouldn't force another.
A couple of examples to consider
Let's take backup applications: despite our continuing ambitions, the market leader appears to be Veritas (now Symantec).
EMC does a lot in the backup and recovery space, and if we're going to be successful in the marketplace, we're going to have to work with Symantec's technology -- despite the fact that we've got Legato (and Dantz!) products to resell.
And, as a result, all of our relavent products work well in the Symantec products, and our PS people working in this area are pretty skilled in working with Symatec products. It's simple: if we're going to play, we're going to have to play with what customers have.
Similar examples exist for storage resource management: our ControlCenter product has to support what the customer has on the floor, and it's not always EMC storage. Documentum is 100% storage agnostic, as is VMware, as is Legato, and so on, and so on.
And it works both ways, as an example our different product businesses have to be agnostic to server virtualization, and that includes Xen, Solaris and so on. We have to work with different email archiving products, content management products, storage management products, etc. than we find in our price book.
Customers want to build stacks of their own choosing. They expect EMC products to work -- and be fully supported -- with other decisions they've made. To do otherwise means that customers won't want our products.
And you know what? There's nothing like a strong economic incentive to drive people to the right behavior.
But there's another side to this argument -- people expect us to invest in making our products work well together. They fully expect -- and demand -- that EMC products can fully exploit other EMC products.
If we don't invest in doing that, they look at us like we're kind of crazy -- so tell me why you bought that again?
The best (or worst) of both worlds?
So we end up having to do both: invest in making sure that EMC products work exceptionally well with non-EMC products, but -- at the same time -- make sure that we can create some measure of unique value when customers use them together.
And, not surprisingly, we don't have access to an infinite engineering budget to do all of this. Even the largest technology companies have to make hard choices about what they do first, what they do second, and what they don't do at all.
How do we choose?
So, how do we figure out how to choose between investments in making EMC products work with non-EMC products, and investing in making EMC products exploit each other?
The answer is deceptively simple: we let customers choose.
For those of you who've ever been involved in a complex decision making process, the simplistic beauty of listening to what your customers want and trying to do it takes away a lot of the mystery (and frustration!).
Maximizing the opportunity -- wherever it leads
EMC's product groups are organized like mini-businesses within a business. So when a product group is trying to figure out what to do, they pursue a strategy of opportunity maximization. If serving their customers better means investments in integrating with non-EMC products, that's the answer. And we've got literally dozens and dozens of examples of this.
Initially, this caused us a bit of philisophical heartburn at the corporate level several years ago, but now we fully realize that freedom of choice is table stakes for anyone building their IT environment.
But what about your own products?
What about integration and exploitation between EMC products? There's two forces at work here.
The first is opportunity maximization: when a company gets acquired by EMC, it immediately has access to EMC's customer base, and -- understandably -- they're more likely to have EMC products than not. So opportunity maximization works here as well. They see an opportunity to work well with other EMC products, because that's what their (new) customers have.
One face
But -- going farther -- we've picked some areas of standardization that we think can create customer value that we're driving towards.
The first is "customer touch points" -- you'd like to have one account manager, one customer services manager, one contract, one portal, and so on.
We're not there yet (it's harder than it looks, and we keep buying new companies), but we understand that we shouldn't be needlessly complicating people's lives.
And there are some technology areas we're attacking as well.
We've been working on a common approach to management for a while now, and are just starting to see the results. We'll be working on similar thoughts in the security domain as well. And we're starting to see commonality and re-use for things like repositories, representational models, and other aspects of our stack.
But let's be clear, this is more of a journey than an event. Don't hold your breath waiting for the uber-integrated, everything-carved-from-a-single-piece-of-stone megafunctional super doohickey.
Even if we could build it, I'd doubt that you'd want it.
More choice is good
So, my advice -- at least when it comes to EMC -- is "don't fear the stack". Each of our acquired companies has grown and thrived simply by being responsive to customers, and I wouldn't expect that to change any time soon. So there's a strong incentive on our part to make sure that the choices you have today will still be there in the future.
But -- at the same time -- we're creating new choices that sit along side existing ones ... mostly in the areas of products that can exploit each other in new and useful ways.
Whether you prefer your choices integrated, or a-la-carte -- well, that's up to you. And maybe that's the reason there's a whole aisle of bottled drinking water at the supermarket. Choice is good, right?
Me? I drink my water from the tap -- it tastes good, and the price is right.
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