Wow, what a ride. It’s been three months since I joined EMC and I am even more excited today than I was then; excited about the changing IT landscape and excited about the opportunity for EMC to address those changes.
First, lets talk a little about that changing landscape.
I see three changes of force occurring simultaneously as we walk into 2014:
- “As a Service” – Whether it’s SaaS, DRaaS, or ITaaS, this trend is all around us. Data Centers, CIOs, VPs of Infrastructure, Storage Admins – we all need to understand this trend and its impact. But, what’s really at the core of this change? Why is this trend happening now? Two key reasons: Time to Value and Time to Money. Businesses are looking for the flexibility, the elasticity, to deliver IT services when and where they need it. Standard IT practices are not getting the job done. Businesses can no longer wait a week for a new application environment to be “spun up”. They need it today. In addition, they need private clouds to deliver services at prices competitive to Amazon. For security or business practice reasons, they can’t move or don’t want to move the data off premises, but they also can’t afford to ignore the value these new ITaaS providers bring to the table.
- Flash is Ubiquitous – Flash has completely changed the storage landscape. While the change from slow cheap storage media to flash is not an overnight phenomenon, make no mistake this change is happening. Almost every customer I talk to has plans to leverage more flash in 2014.
- Convergence or is it Hyper Convergence? – We’ve seen growth over several decades of shared storage that brought us from local storage to network storage, but also that brought complexity and cost. The potential to go from a three-layer architecture (server, network, storage) to a single layer that allows you to scale both computing power and storage power together is extremely intriguing.
When I first joined EMC, I was told that the company not only welcomed change, but also anticipated change. Challenging the norm, thinking out of the box, driving innovation of the “Next Big Thing” is in the fabric of this company.
Just look at the early success of XtremIO. Other examples include Isilon, Avamar, and Data Domain – all have shown EMC’s willingness to disrupt established file, backup or non deduped data businesses.
So what’s in store for disruption in 2014 given the flash, convergence, and “Anything as a Service” vectors? I think we all need to get ready to redefine storage yet again. Get ready for hyper convergence giving you the flexibility to deliver storage and computing as a service in a time to value curve as never seen before.
Stay tuned and watch this space because there is more to say about this in the coming months.
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More Tech Predictions for 2014
SDx (Software-Defined Everything) by Amitabh Srivastava, President, Advanced Software Division
A Battle Cry for Protected Storage by Stephen Manley, Chief Technology Officer, Data Protection & Availability Division
Software-Defined in Two Architectures by Josh Kahn, Senior Vice President, Global Solutions Marketing
Bringing Hadoop to Your Big Data by Bill Richter, President, Isilon
Targeting the Value Office to Transform IT Business by Rick Devenuti, President, Information Intelligence Group
IT’s Ability to Evolve Quickly by Vic Bhagat, Chief Information Officer
As BYOD Matures, BYOI is Waiting in the Wings by Art Coviello, President, RSA
Service Orientation, Big Data Lakes, & Security Product Rationalization by Tom Roloff, Senior Vice President, Global Services
