There is much to consider when you reflect on the past three years at VCE. It started with the inception of a joint venture which brought together three leaders in technology to realize one vision: to simplify and mobilize the path to cloud computing for businesses across the world. When you look at what’s been achieved in three years, it’s nothing short of remarkable.
More than 1,000 VblockTM Systems shipped. A $1 billion run rate. Nearly thirteen hundred VCE employees with a single vision. Yet we feel we’ve only scratched the surface of the opportunity for VCE and our customers.
Today, we celebrate a milestone as the biggest wave of innovation in VCE history hits the market. With the introduction of new Vblock Systems and VCE VisionTM Intelligent Operations, we are extending the value of converged infrastructure to operations, to new markets, and to industry-leading software applications. These announcements will bring simplicity to enterprises and service providers, helping them to modernize and transform their data center environments. Speed and simplicity changes everything for customers, and that’s what Vblock Systems bring.
Perhaps most exciting, the genesis of this new wave of innovation came from our customers and partners. The work that we have done over the past three years with Vblock Systems delivered tremendous value, but it also came with a wave of excitement and demand about where converged infrastructure can go next. Our customers asked us to find ways to extend Vblock Systems across their enterprise and to bring operational simplicity to data center management. Our partners asked for Vblock Systems that will bring the value of converged infrastructure to mid-sized businesses. Today’s announcements reflect what we’ve heard.
Which brings me to our own evolution. In the first 6 months of VCE’s existence, over $100 Million of Vblocks Systems shipped. Many of those first Vblocks were field assembled, and we quickly decided that if we were to meet demand, we needed a means to deliver platform consistency. With consistency – or as we call it, ruthless standardization – comes speed, predictability and operational cost savings for our customers. This alone stands as one of the primary reasons why VCE in October of 2010 transitioned all Vblock sales from a reference architecture assembled on a customer premise, to a Vblock System, manufactured in VCE facilities. It was a seminal moment, for VCE and for our industry.
But the decision to create the first converged infrastructure – and to continue to innovate on that platform with today’s announcements – was just the first step. Innovation requires resources, and one of the most important things VCE brings to the market is the ability to leverage over $20 billion of R&D and the world’s leading engineering talent from VCE and our investor companies. No other company has such a luxury and as CTO, I’m privileged to be in such a position to build something truly unique.
Today’s announcements deliver on our vision to help customers dramatically simplify their data centers, and will enable our channel partners to deliver that value to an ever wider range of customers. But ultimately, the key to securing market share is driving innovation that creates a differentiated customer experience. That’s been our focus from the beginning. From the converged infrastructure of the past two years, to converged operations, to the next-generation data center driven by dynamic awareness, predictive analysis and autonomic optimization.
It’s been an exciting three years – and there is so much more innovation we have to share.
