Chuck's Blog

New Partnering Models For Our B2B Customers

Vendors often rhapsodize about aspiring to be "true business partners" vs. mere peddlers of tech.  Well, here at EMC we're getting far more opportunities to actually do just that.

Case in point -- Pitney Bowes today launched a cool new document processing service, aimed at their customers, one where EMC is doing far more than just supplying some interesting tech.

But there are some broader themes here that are worth looking at more closely.

Why Measuring Simplicity Can Be Complex

Anyone who works in IT knows that product simplicity and usability is important today, and becoming even more important going forward.

We at EMC spend a lot of time on this topic.  And, when it comes to usability, there's always room for improvement.

But, unfortunately, there are no generally accepted standards for usability.  Sure, we can count mouse clicks for commonly performed tasks, but we all know there's far more to the story than that.  Worse yet, it all can devolve into a marketing shouting match, with very useful information for users of products to objectively evaluate.  Not a good thing.

As a result, we've now started to turn to third party firms to evaluate our products' usability.  Tell us the good, tell us the bad -- but, most importantly, tell us where we need to get better.

And, in the spirit of transparency, I'd like to share the methodology and the results with you.

Of Clouds And Perceptions Of Risk

I was on vacation last week, but I couldn't help noticing all the furor over the Amazon outage.

"OK", I thought, "an infrastructure provider had a bad day -- it happens."  Just the same as any power utility, or an airline, or a phone service, or a railroad, or any other provider of shared infrastucture services. 

But the Amazon outage had deeper significance, as for many it now has become a symbol of All Things Cloud, especially the public, commodity kind. 

And, like many public events, our collective reactions probably say more about us than we'd like to admit.

Profiles In IT Leadership: Josh Sigel of UNFI

I get to meet a lot of very cool IT leaders as part of my role here at EMC.  I've always felt that we should invest the time in sharing their stories and perspectives  for the benefit of everyone.

Consider this the inaugural post along those lines.  As time allows, I'd like to share as many of these as possible.

Why?  Because there's something to be learned from everyone.

Helping To Create The Case For Cloud

It's an increasingly common scenario with our customers.

Senior IT leadership wants to transform a traditional IT organization into a more cloud-like IT service provider.  They know it's important, and there's a sense of urgency.

But there's a real cloud of thorny issues swirling around. 

What's the potential opportunity?  How ready are we?  What stays internal, and what would be better off run externally?  What changes do we need to make to achieve the potential?

And -- more importantly -- how do we start making progress towards our goal?

A while back, EMC Consulting rose to the challenge, and started to offer a suite of Cloud Advisory services around these themes.  Customer feedback has been extremely positive.

And, with this post, I wanted to share with you some highlights of what we've learned over multiple engagements.

More Isilon Big Data Magic

Now that Isilon is a full member of the EMC storage family, there's a lot to like.

For storage aficionados like me, Isilon's OneFS technology is so simple and effective for storing big data, it's almost magical.

If you're willing to dive into the details, be prepared to potentially unlearn many of your previous assumptions about how things work in a NAS environment.

The way that OneFS does things might be academically interesting in more modest environments -- say, a handful of terabytes. 

But as capacity under management grows to hundreds -- or typically thousands of terabytes, the elegance of the OneFS approach starts to become downright compelling.

Today, Isilon announced a slew of enhancements and upgrades at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show.  Not surprising, storage at NAB is all about video and content at scale.

And there's a lot to like with today's announcements.

The Role Of Service Providers In Breaking The Stockholm Syndrome

I work with enterprise IT groups.  I also work with a growing cadre of enterprise-focused IT service providers.

And, occasionally, I spot an area where one group can help the other in a deep and very strategic way.

Game Over In The CPU Wars?

I don't know how many of us paid any particular notice to Intel's recent announcement of the E7 processors.  I mean, isn't it more of the faster, bigger, more efficient, more functional same?

Well -- yes and no.

For me, it's the final sign that -- yes -- the era of Big Unix on proprietary RISC processors is finally coming to a close.

More Big News From Greenplum

I love these guys. 

It wasn't long after their acquisition by EMC, I realized that -- not only had EMC acquired state-of-the art database technology -- but we'd acquired a world-class team as well.

Shortly after the acquisition, EMC announced the formation of a new division -- the Data Computing Division with Greenplum at its core -- and its first hardware platform, the Greenplum DCA -- data computing appliance.

This was shortly followed by a popular "community edition" of their powerful platform and toolset  Their full toolset, basically free for non-production environments.  More coolness.

And today, at the SAS Global Forum, they did it again: announcing not only a major integration with SAS, but entirely new versions of the DCA as well. 

Impressive.

Why Having A Broad Portfolio Is Cool

In the IT industry, everyone can be a critic, and one of the criticisms occasionally leveled at EMC is that our portfiolo is somehow "too broad".  I never really understood that perspective.

Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but -- from that increasing breadth -- can arise some interesting solutions that might be hard to achieve otherwise.

Such is the case with today's announcement (spearheaded by EMC's Iomega division) around partnership with AXIS (a video surveillance technology service provider) to provide a cloud-based video surveillance solution.

And there are a couple of interesting angles to this one ...