Dell, EMC, Dell Technologies, Cisco,

Monday, September 5, 2016

Of supermarkets, Volkswagen and the future of Dell-EMC

Analysis September 7 sees #DellTechnologies absorb #EMC and its #VMware holding. Storage watchers are seeing lots of overlap between the #Dell and EMC storage products and wondering if there is going to be a product cull. So far there are no signs of this and it could be useful to ask if Dell + EMC is going to be a traditional few-products-for-broad-markets company or a storage supermarket. A traditional storage products company has non- or minimally-overlapping products, such as all-flash arrays or hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIA) or NAS filers, and pushes these as the best products in the market against competing products; Nutanix appliances versus #SimpliVity, EMC #VxRail or #Cisco #HyperFlex ones, for example. A server company wishing to have storage software use its servers will often have a meet-in-the-channel strategy with validated software suppliers products running on, for example, Cisco or #Lenovo servers, and being available to Cisco and Lenovo channel partners. These software products, such as HCIA software oroducts from Maxta and others, can and often do overlap and compete, but the server vendor does not care; whatever software a customer wants to run on its servers is fine by it. Even when a server vendor then gets actual skin in a product category game, such as Cisco OEM'ing #Springpath HCI software for its HyperFlex HCIA , then it will carry on with now-competing, meet-in-the-channel alternatives. Hold this thought, and let's consider, as an analogy, car manufacturers such as Volkswagen and supermarkets such as Walmart and others. For both, the idea of overlapping products is no problem.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/05/dell_emc_and_the_storage_supermarket/

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