At the risk of further ad-hominem attacks, I will note again that all might not be well with the relationship between Cisco and EMC, particularly within the context of their VCE joint venture.
I suggested previously that Cisco and EMC might be heading for a not-so-amicable divorce, and I still feel that the organizational and technological auguries point in that direction. The signs at VCE — which provides converged infrastructure comprising Cisco servers and switches, EMC storage, and VMware virtualization — have been inauspicious lately, with layoffs, significant restructuring, and Cisco’s increasingly ardent converged-infrastructure partnership with EMC competitor NetApp adding murk to the mix.
Capellas Loses CEO Title
Now, there’s more to consider. A few weeks ago, as reported by The Register, Michael Capellas was delisted as VCE’s CEO on the company’s website. Capellas is a Cisco board member who was strongly backed by John Chambers for the CEO position at VCE. The official story from VCE is that nothing has changed at VCE, that Capellas’ role remains the same even though he’s lost the CEO designation and now shares the responsibility of running the company with Frank Hauck, a longtime EMC executive who was appointed VCE president earlier this year.
Perhaps VCE’s official spin on the mahogany-row shuffle is true, but skepticism seems warranted.
In the same piece at The Register that updates us on Capellas’ current status at VCE, we also learn that a source formerly employed by the joint venture says “the Cisco originator of the Vblock concept is no longer at VCE and neither is the Cisco staffer who ran VCE’s service provider and channel sales operation.”
Mere coincidence, one might contend, and I’m inclined to take that possibility under advisement.
EMC in Server Business?
There’s one other piece of evidence to consider, though. As reported by The Register (yes, again), EMC seems to have moved, via its storage arrays, into the server business. That, as you might expect, could have implications for EMC’s relationship with Cisco and its Unified Computing System (UCS) servers.
Here’s a particularly salient excerpt from The Register article, written by Chris Mellor:
“If you have a VMAX, with flash-enhanced engines, able to run application software, then you wouldn’t need UCS servers to do that job. Were EMC to do a deal with a network supplier, then you wouldn’t need Cisco network switches to hook the application server/array complex up to accessing clients either, and we might have a VMAXblock as well as a Vblock.”
For its part, EMC is ambiguous on whether it’s actually entering the server space. On his blog, EMC staffer Mark Twomey has enjoyed some mischievous fun with the proposition, concluding that EMC’s moves put in the compute and systems business and “maybe” in the server business.
Such fine distinctions might be lost on server vendors such as HP, Dell, and IBM.
Follow the Money
Let’s remember that EMC is the overwhelming majority shareholder — and, thus, owner — of VMware. As such, the virtualization leader will not do anything to hurt the business prospects of its de facto parent. More to the point, VMware remains in the strategic service of EMC, furthering its big-picture agenda while advancing its own interests.
That combination isn’t just a competitive threat to the likes of HP, IBM, and Dell. Increasingly — indirectly or otherwise — Cisco seems to be in EMC-VMware gunsights, too.
Twilight in the Valley of the Nerds 