Now it can ship Solaris/SPARC/Sun Storage stacks underneath its database and other middleware and use Solaris virtualization features. Where does that leave us, wanting as we do to sell storage and our software into Oracle shops?

I’ve had an exec group working on this for some months and I’m gonna let you in on our game plan.

For those Oracle shops that run Oracle software on third-party servers, it’s the same story as now, for now. We pich the UCS vBlocks against the servers there and our Symmetrix/CLARiiON/Celerra against the storage alternatives there; basically no change.

In the longer term, though, we have to weaken Oracle in those accounts because Ellison’s crew will be selling the integrated Oracle stack story, what I call blowing Sun shine up their asses. That cuts us out, it’s a door-closer. The first way we counter this is to start making friends with SAP and Microsoft SQL. We’ll look for joint-selling type deals because we now have a shared enemy so we better be friends, right? This is my kind of fun.

The second way is for us to extend vBlocks up the stack. Customers are going to want integrated stacks from their applications right through to their disk spindles and flash drives. Larry may be a weird west coast cookie with a taste for things outside normal family life but he’s no flake when it comes to business. He’s right on the nail over this integrated stack thing. We’re going to have to talk to people like SAP and SQL and Terradata and Netezza and say, let’s build our own integrated app stack, let’s build a SAP vBlock, a SQL vBlock, whatever. Integrate your software onto our vBlock hardware and let’s bite Larry in the ass.

The third thing we have to do is push our aquisition horizons up a bit more. Oracle buys Sun and heads our way. Okay Larry, you want a fight, you got a fight. Let’s buy into his middleware market core, let’s stick a stake right in his heartland. Could we buy SAP? Would this be a better idea than buying Dell? I’m having our acquisitions team look around Larry’s software territory and spy out the possibilities.

Where Larry sells Sun storage separately, into Oracle shops using third-party servers and into non-Oracle shops if that’s what he’s going to do, then we should do well. The 7000 is obviously not mission-critical and not tested for that kind of work in enterprise data centers. It was put together by too-clever Sun engineers with open source software, so how can you rely on it? That systems organization at Sun was run by a guy that couldn’t comb his hair and he reported to a guy with a pony-tail. These people were flakes, they still are flakes, and you can’t trust them or their products.

Now joke time; the mid-range and low-end Sun storage arrays are not even on the same planet as CLARiiON and Celerra. We’ve been busting their chops and will continue doing that. The hybrid storage servers, Thumper or whatever the thing is called, is probably doomed but I’m having a team look over the possibility of putting a few UCS blades alongside bladed CLARiiON stores into an appliance and then we’ve got a Thumper-buster if we need one.

What about the StorageTek tapes? Two words: Data and Domain. If that’s not enough we can do a deal with Spectra, as Belluzzo isn’t talking to us anymore. That’ll give us a big enough tape library until Atmos clouds can do the business.

Larry E is just a wildly successful big mouth who’s going to over-reach himself. His golden goose is his software profitability through commoditizing everything else. We’re going to chip away at that by doing deals with SAP and the others and cut this over-grown Silicon Valley playboy down to size. He’s disrespectful but we can’t yet make him an offer he can’t refuse. Trust me, we’re going to be working on it, and Larry’s going to regret the day that he ever let McNealy soft soap him.

© Don Joey for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Ellison Ain’t No Sun King
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I wanted to take a minute to address this whole “Don Joey” thing. See, I’m not at all like this in person. They made up a picture of me looking like the Godfather, ferchrissakes! I’m not some kind of mafia guy, I’m more like a friendly grandfather. I guess my Italian heritage makes people take me wrong.

They sexed up the memos I wrote, too. And PR took out some great stuff I wanted to say about Mikey Dell. But I guess it’s for the better after the phone call I just had with him. He’s all over this acquisition idea, says I’m right that he just couldn’t find anyone in Round Rock that was ready to take over. Boy, I can sympathize with that!

I told him about my situation with Davey Donatelli. Damn, just saying that guy’s name burns me up. I thought he was gonna work out here on South Street but he was already making the wrong enemies. I guess him leaving was for the best since it meant I didn’t have to break the news to him that he’d never get my job. He just couldn’t handle it long term. He got lucky, made some good moves, but the boys on the board would have eaten him up. Glad I didn’t have to push him out with plan B!

But I’m luckier than Mikey since I got lots of other guys to choose from. I like what I’m getting from Pauley Maritz so far over at VMware. He’s sure easier to deal with than that woman who was running the place when I bought it! Then there’s Patty G, come over from Intel. They’re gonna miss him, let me tell you. I’ll let those two fight it out over who gets my seat at the $100 billion company I’m gonna leave behind!

Me and Mikey were also talking about how we would handle the PR situation that this is gonna create. We gotta win over the financial guys before we go public, but that’ll be easy enough to do. I’m gonna turn a few hundred million bucks into about $20 billion in valuation, and they’ll be drooling when I announce that!

The so-called industry analysts are another story. They all think they’re so smart, but this one guy takes the cake. It’s funny, see, because I fired him years ago but he likes to forget about all that. Instead he’s always kissing my ass on one side and kicking it on the other. You might think he’d be on board since we pay him so much for his “advice”, but it’s gonna take more than that. But I got a plan. If I make it look like he came up with the whole thing he’ll play ball. Sure he’ll go around taking credit for the whole thing, but who really cares?

Damn, that girl from PR is back already. I forgot how many Dunkies there are around here, next time I’ll send her for Krispy Kremes! She got herself a light and sweet, man, who can stand those things?

© Don Joey for Gestalt IT, 2010. | A Personal Word From Plain Old Joe
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And we can handle this. Dell is a $28.2 billion company now, market cap again, so we’re bigger. We run our storage racket, much, much better than Dell runs its system and server stuff, at least compared to HP and IBM. Think about it for a second: How much bigger could Dell be if we ran it and gave it the EMC smarts?

Look, the company is fading. Whatever Michael does, it’s fading. And it’s an EMC reseller, it fits. Think about it, it resells CLARiiON and Celerra. I know, the EqualLogic stuff is squeezing CLARiiON out but we can fix that problem quick. EqualLogic can become our iSCSI SAN brand or something, I mean its small potatoes.

Okay, my guys will be asking two things right? Where do we get the cash for the buy and won’t it piss off VMware’s server partners if we start selling our own servers. These guys are always seeing problems. It’s another opportunity, spelled out as in S – E – L – L – V – M – W – A – R – E.

Think about it. We sell VMware off for about $15 billion, keeping 10% and board representation so we don’t get screwed down the pike. Now we have $15 billion green ones cash plus our own shares to buy Dell. This gives us a $65 billion chunk of the pie and we’re up to half the size, sort of, against IBM ($173 billion), HP ($124 billion) and Cisco ($140 billion). We get our own integrated stack, D-Blocks, whatever, we don’t piss off VMware’s partners, and we get a chance to screw around with Microsoft and Intel by owning Dell servers and PCs. Look guys, we gotta grow, we gotta grow big and this is a plan to die for. I know, I’m the only one that can see this and that’s why I’m top dog around Hopkinton.

So we buy Dell in 2010/2011, integrate all that, and then it’s time for the big takedown. This will be a $50 billion buy that take us up into Cisco, HP and IBM territory. Then I can retire. I got an idea about that, about how we can do it, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m telling my guys to have a look at Dell.

Trust me, Michael’s tired and he knows he can’t hack it. We could give it to Gelsinger as his proving ground. Something tells me he’s maybe good enough to run the whole show. It’s between him and Maritz but there’s plenty of time for that. I’m going to have me a little sit-down with Michael.

© Don Joey for Gestalt IT, 2010. | The Dell Opportunity
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Those HP StorageWorks guys have a lot of sounds-good-but-sells-nothing crap in their locker. Remember RISS? That’s the role the ExDS9100 whatever fancy box is doing now. Then he’s got to somehow knock sense into the PolyServe takeover (PolyCurve? No, forget that one) and Ibrix. We really kicked everyone’s NAS butt with Celerra. But EVA, damn it, EVA 2 could be good.

We got a unified stack with Cisco and VMware, but Cisco and servers, I don’t know. How good is Chambers really, I mean really really? He’s spread himself awful thin over the thousand and one things Cisco is doing and, I know, Cisco is Cisco. But Chambers isn’t going to be there for ever, and Hurd is probably going to outlive him.

If the Cisco servers don’t really hack it (and, you know, they may not), it’s not like Dell, HP and IBM are wallflowers at the server dance. Then there’s that Acer guy that says we’re all dinosaurs. He’s nibbling at the foursome’s heels and we need a backstop. Okay, put that off to one side for a minute. Let’s think about growth.

We’re a $53.4 billion market capitalization company. Ok, $36.6 billion if you strip out VMware. How are we going to gow more? I says to my guys, “look, there’s no more real growth in the storage business. To do something big there we gotta buy HDS or NetApp and both would give us a world of hurt in integrating their products, especially NetApp’s, and there’s a real chance the sum of the parts could be less than the sum of the separate pieces. Let’s not even go there.”

The information infrastructure stuff is growing. Hollis keeps yacking at me (even more than normal) about this. It’s two or three times a week now! Doesn’t that guy ever sleep or eat or play golf? But I tell him, “that stuff is organic and that means slow and we need something quicker than twenty years from now.” I’ll be long gone then. I want something big on my crown. I don’t wanna slink off like Warmenhoven, always thinking I coulda been a contender.

This is getting kinda long, so I’ll just cut it off here. But I got an idea that’ll kill you. Seriously, it’ll blow you away. But first I gotta make some calls and set some stuff in motion. Maybe I’ll tell you about it on Monday or something.

© Don Joey for Gestalt IT, 2010. | What’s Keeping Me Up At Night
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You may have Dave and he may be free to work on storage now but we got the nearest thing to God in this business; we got Gelsinger. So anyway, you’re sucking up to Microsoft with this FrontLine schtick and putting in a quarter of a billion to get your products skin-to-skin with Hyper-V and System Center and whatever but it don’t amount to much at all really because we’re mounting a flanker on you.

Yep, we got NetApp, those Sunnyvale boy scouts, cosying up to Cisco and VMware and saying they’re better partners for them than we are at Hopkinton – like anybody will believe that, really! Chambers won’t be there – that tells everybody what he thinks about it – but it’s VMware baby, ESX all the way. Sure, NetApp has its Microsoft affair going full blast too but VMware is where the action is and everybody knows it.

We’ll have Paul Maritz sitting alongside Tom G at the VCN event on the 26th and he’ll pour smooth sauce all over Microsoft. He should be able to do that; he worked at Redmond alongside Ballmer. Hyper-V sucks; we all know it, it’s the Vista of virtualisation, we just can’t say it – yet.

So what’s the real story with Donatelli? Because this ain’t it. Is it going to be this big EVA re-jig thing with X86 controllers taking on different storage personalities? You ducked starting over with the high-end refresh, going with that USP-V-on-steroids thing coming out of HDS. The Frontline money had to come from somewhere, right? Good luck. While that’s getting started we’re coining it with V-Max, like FAST – geddit? Hah!

No, Donatelli’s playground is gonna be the EVA re-invention. Mark, we looked at this. I mean seriously, we did. But the customers want differentiation, they want to buy different iron, different brands for different jobs. Why else do you think we can get ten times as much for our stuff than yours? Just having software identities won’t cut it. Look at NetApp. They really only got one product and there they are, stuck. Yeah, they’re bigger than the chorus line suppliers, the 3PARs, the Compellents, the Pillars whatever. But they’re not a star. They’re not EMC.

Give Warmenhoven credit, he tried to go our way by buying Data Domain, parading Slootman like a big country club trophy at his all hands meeting. A lotta good it did him once the Hopkinton dogs barked and showered dollars all over the floor. Now Slootman is mine and Dan? He’s off polishing his putter, flying his jet between golf courses, and out of it with Georgens running the show.

These guys are dancing to our tune and you’ve got no chance with Hyper-V. Gelsinger is a God-driven dynamo and you’ll find Donatelli is a fish out of the water. He’s maybe got one good product refresh in him and than that’s it. He’ll become another one of the worn-out has-been execs you inherited when you walked into HP.

No, Donatelli won’t cut it. Word is he’s already pissed off Roberson. Maybe I’ll have HR give Roberson a call, eh? Would you like that? We could give him CLARiiON or Celerra or something like that to play with.

Hey, that’s enough for now. I gotta look at the new candidate acquisition list. What; Pillar? Really? Okay, you got Workman’s number… No, better call Larry first.

© Don Joey for Gestalt IT, 2010. | What Are HP and Hurd Up To?
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