“What we’re trying to do with the alliance is offer a clearly defined set of solutions for customers in terms of platform, the virtual OS, and a whole range of services around how you secure platforms and wider management capabilities.” reveals Andy Waterhouse of EMC.
The EMEA pre-sales director for EMC’s Resource Management Software Group, Waterhouse is talking about the latest partnership between his company, Cisco Systems, and VMware. The three corporations are already inextricably linked, with EMC a majority shareholder in VMware and Cisco a minority owner, but the partnership – which will bring an increasingly streamlined service to customers - also aims to deliver greater synergy in the virtual data management sector.
“The challenge of most organisations in terms of driving virtual data centre and the Cloud is how they achieve it, because virtualisation is a somewhat complex from a manage point of view,” says Waterhouse. “Not only do you have to manage the virtual infrastructure, but the physical underlying infrastructure too.”
Regardless of whether a company is transitioning to virtualised infrastructure either wholly or partially, Waterhouse points out the need to rethink its infrastructure – and rapidly. “One of the key things as a group is how looking at the virtual data centre in the Cloud, companies need to change the way they think,” he says. “If you look at the way people manage it infrastructure up to now, it’s been slow to change. “With virtualisation, people need to move to a new approach to managing data centre; in doing so we can change the game and enable organisations to drive new business.”
Interest in the Cloud has grown throughout the past eighteen months, with lower initial costs than traditional hardware and software alternatives as a driving factor. Waterhouse is confident adoption of Cloud services is maturing, helped at least in part by the current economic situation: “I think we’re beyond the initial adopter phase. I would suggest that because of the economic climate, it is much easier to justify going in and buying computer power when you need it, than it is to physically pick your hardware.”
He agrees however that personal data centres are far from their dying days: “Even though we [provide virtual ], there’s always going to be a need for your own data centre; certainly in the short term cloud will not replace that.”
Somewhat inevitably given the already close nature of the three companies, the discussion eventually turns to the future prospects of a merger and/or acquisition. Is the partnership just the latest step on the road towards such a deal? Waterhouse deflects the question, insisting it merely “builds on what’s been going on for a number of years.”
“Who knows what might happen in the future,” he adds cryptically. “From a corporate perspective, it’s a very corporate partnership, and there’s a lot more to come. As to what will happen in the future, that’s in the future.”
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