Notes from Inside the Storage Giant
Career note: I joined EMC this year, and my first assignment is Bermuda — grow the consulting business there. A decade of building systems for schools, factories, and hospitals got me here. Now I get to see how the biggest rooms in this industry think. The rooms are big.
Two things are moving the data center at the same time. Virtualization — VMware, which EMC owns — lets one physical server run twenty virtual ones, and the average server closet is suddenly mostly air and wasted electricity. And this month Amazon, the bookstore, started renting storage over the web by the gigabyte. People at conferences laugh when I bring it up. I have stopped laughing.
What clients actually buy from us is not boxes. It is the pile stopping growing faster than the budget, plus somebody accountable at 3 a.m. That is a services business, and it is the part I know how to build.
The center of gravity is shifting from products to services, from owning to renting. I do not just believe that. I signed an offer letter about it.