As some of you know, I'm over in Rome for a few days of meetings, to be followed by a week of overdue vacation time.
Much has been said about EMC and VMware's recent strong quarters, including this unique perspective from Storagezilla, but I wanted to share one big thought that stood out above all else.
All About Earnings Calls
Earning calls in our industry are mostly about economic results -- how well did you do, how well do you expect to do, etc. All of that is pretty standard fare. You can listen to EMC's here, or get a transcript here.
Where these calls get more interesting is when executives use their brief time to highlight trends of interest to investors. And this one had a doozy, in my opinion.
The UBS Survey
Several of the large investment firms conduct regular and well-respected studies of IT spending intentions. One of the ones that many of us follow comes from UBS.
They do an in-depth survey of 100 CIOs in larger firms, with a 60/40 spread between US and Europe. There's also a nice mix of verticals as well. No survey is perfect, but it's a fairly representative sample as these things go.
Hardware spending intentions were being largely driven by three kinds of virtualization: server virtualization, desktop and/or client virtualization, and storage virtualization.
The Data Center Modernization Question
One of the more interesting queries was around data center transformation: which company or alliance do you believe is best positioned to implement data center transformation?
The result?
An astounding 48% of the responses said VCE. In the US, it was even stronger: 57%. By comparison, HP -- representing a more traditional approach -- came in at around 31%.
And several other big names weren't even listed.
If you follow this blog, you'll know that I've been promoting VCE and private clouds for some time, as well as sharing my impressions regarding the strong uptake of both the concepts and technologies. In some ways, this is strong confirmation for what I've been seeing for the last year or so.
The Data Center Organizational Modernization Question
It stands to reason that -- if the data center will be modernized -- that the organization that runs it will be "modernized" as well. New processes, new workflows, new roles -- and new skills.
Anecdotal evidence is starting to accumulate that -- yes -- this will be a big topic as well going forward.
Although this article ("Apocalypse Soon: 52 Percent of CIOs Plan To Blow Up IT Groups") is perhaps overly dramatic, the mood has changed.
Whether it's application development, infrastructure, or any other IT traditional IT discipline -- the old ways of doing things appear to be quickly coming to a close.
Where are you in your journey to the private cloud?
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