I Love A Good Disruption

If you're like me, you love to see the continual cycles of disruption that percolate through our industry.

You might wonder why a "disrupto-phile" like me would work for a large, successful behemoth of an IT company like EMC, it's easy. 

It's pretty easy, actually. First, you don't get large and successful without paying attention to disruptive trends.  And, second, it's far more fun when you are the disruptor rather than the disruptee.

Case in point: a rather innocuous announcement from our Iomega subsidiary, found here.

You can say what you want around the pros and the cons of the actual product, but the thinking it represents is interesting. 

Think of it as yet another example of EMC's unique approach to creative disruption.

What You Get With The Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d NAS Array

For $700, here's a sampling of what you get.

* a starter config of 2TB that goes to 8TB internally and more externally

* All the usual RAID modes, dual 1Gb ethernet

* simple remote replication

* NAS, CIFS and iSCSI support, including Windows AD awareness

* full VMware certification

* a dead-simple operational model that even I could handle

* and a bunch more cool functionality you'll find in the press release

Basically, I see it as entry-level IT-grade equipment at consumer electronics prices.  This is a serious level of storage technology that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars just a few years back.

Chad wrote a nice post here.  So did Stephen Foskett.

That's cool.

Interesting sidebar: for some reason, EMC has acquired the perception that we sell expensive stuff.  Given the competitive nature of our marketplaces, nobody gets to charge a premium for much of anything these days, so the facts of the matter are in direct opposition to the perceptions.  Our competitors do everything they can to keep this perception alive in the marketplace, of course.

However, when a customer half-jokingly asks for cheap storage, I half-jokingly offer them an Iomega product as an alternative.  I mean, $1899 list for 8TB raw of NAS isn't going to example break the bank.

Rationale Of The Deal

Way back when we acquired Iomega, there were two primary rationales for the deal, only one of which we shared publicly at the time.

What we said publicly as that EMC wanted to participate in the consumer storage marketplace, which was absolutely a true statement.

But, behind the scenes, we could see consumer-oriented IT technology quickly evolving into roles suitable for a growing number of business-oriented IT applications.  But, to do this, you couldn't just adapt EMC's traditional enterprise strengths for an entirely new market.

You had to think about the problem differently.

As we looked into this space, we found a completely different set of assumptions around customer needs, source technologies, supply chain, distrubtion and support.  The people playing in this space had built an entirely different business model than we at EMC were familiar with.

We were completely and utterly fascinated.

We also saw the attractiveness of Iomega selectively using technologies and capabilities from EMC's broader pool. And we also saw the potential of taking some the tricks they had figured out, and applying them to our enterprise offerings.

Hey, Iomega guys, need a world-class iSCSI stack or CIFS code?  EMC's got that. 
VMware qualification?  EMC has been there, done that, here's how. 
RSA security technology?  Help yourself, guys.

Hey, EMC guys, want to run a really efficient supply chain?  Welcome to consumer electronics.
Want to get exposed to new channels, like retail?  Iomega is doing that today.
Want to get serious about true product simplicity?  Welcome to the Iomega world.

There are other examples, but you get the picture.

The Hybridized Disruption Model In Action

When you talk about technology disruption, most people think about the small startup, coming from below, progressively improving their technology until it encroaches on established players. 

I think we've done one better here -- all of that thinking, plus the inarguable benefits of wide access to the strengths of the leading industry player -- if needed. 

If you think about it, EMC has established a high-ground beachhead in storage, as well as an attractive entry point far below, and then worked progessively towards the middle.  The big stuff gets smaller and easier to consume.  And the small stuff gets more powerful and capable, yet retains its small-stuff attributes that makes it so appealing.

I've just illustrated one example of this sort of thinking in action -- there are many, many others across our portfolio, with more to come.

Back To The Premise

In the IT world, things are changing scarily fast.  You've got to seek out the disruptive forces that are out there, and make them part of your strengths, rather than threats to your business model.

One of the reasons I continue to love working at EMC is just that -- we're all "disrupto-philes" here -- we usually see potential disruption as something to be embraced and leveraged, rather than something to be avoided at all costs.  I think we tend to do a pretty good job at this compared to other large technology vendors.

I wonder how other larger tech companies think about this topic?

Comments

[Brian]

Well done. You guys should go teach Cisco a trick or two about how to leverage enterprise technology expertise for their Linksys retail products.

So are their plans to allow companies to build clouds based on Iomega and Atmos? Seems like the perfect combination of uber-cheap hardware and software looking for a large problem.

[Chuck Hollis]

Hi Brian

Atmos is hardware-agnostic ... it can run on just about anything.

The usual problem is one of replicated infrastructure at scale: what looks cute and cheap for 4 drives becomes horribly inefficient at 400, 4,000 or 40,000.

Although the idea of an Atmos node running on a cast-off PC and an Iomega unit in branch offices around the globe is kind of an interesting idea ...

-- Chuck

[chad]

Is there a plan to integrate this with the AX line or Clariion or Celerra? Can I replicate data from one tier to another or is this essentially introducing yet another tier of storage that is yet another technology island?