More an EMC BooHoo
We are actively looking at large scale object store at the moment and it is a market that filled with niche players, all looking for a slice of the cake. There are a couple of incumbents but they have products that were early to market and that market is now changing.
Object storage is not like block and is generally not sold by flashy account managers to directors. Object storage is driven by techies who understand what it does and have a genuine requirement to implement it. For the suppliers this is their worst nightmare as they are talking to an audience that probably understand more about the subject than they do.
For the big names like EMC that change means that they are no longer able to bring in the woolly suits and death by Powerpoint to the board and con them into buying expensive kit because it has an EMC badge on the front. EMC are looking increasingly stale and there is a finite limit to how long you can trade on past successes. The need for Object storage is being driven by researchers and the seemingly infinite amounts of data they produce. The corporate merry go round of replacement of kit by an entrenched vendor is stopping. The last laugh is that at a board level CFO is suddenly going to realise quite how much he has being paying in the past for a brand name.