back to article EMC customers show distinct lack of Dell delight – research

EMC customers are far from delighted regarding the proposed Dell takeover, according to the 451 research house. Its research report found 43 per cent of EMC-only customers typically see Dell as a PC supplier, and 42 per cent thought it was out of tune with their enterprise IT concerns. Amongst the EMC-only customers, some 13 …

  1. BenBell

    ...Sounds like it's a good day to work for IBM. It will be interesting to see how bigger shift towards XIV there is over the coming months, or whether this is just more moaning for moanings sake.

    1. Rainer

      I don't know about IBM.

      It could always be that the thing you buy this year is sold to China next year....

  2. Stephen McLaughlin

    The EMC folks I work with are not happy at all being purchased by Dell. It's reminiscent of Compaq acquiring DEC. I think most people in IT view EMC as a premium product and Dell as low-end PC and Server company not really focused on quality but rather high-volume sales to make profit margins. I wonder where this puts the EMC-Cisco relationship. EMC has been pushing Cisco blades now for a while and customers seem content.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not the first time...

    .. a PC/server company bought a storage vendor.

    When Sun Microsystem was dying they aquired StorageTek to provide them with life support. At first they laughed at the STK guys, because storage was just something that gets connected to their servers.

    A little time later, every Sun employee wanted to be a Storage Expert hoping it would save his/her job.

    BTW, Sun didn't make PC's - they made expensive PC's. And that Operating System and Java- that suff was free :)....

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Not the first time...

      STK was acquired for ~$3B. They owned $1B of assets and had $1B in the bank. Not a bad deal to bring in enterprise relevance for a net $1B.

      STK and Sun were no longer leading in anything, least of all storage, not to mention the lack of relevant innovation coming from either company.

      Contrast this with Dell - a leader in many segments - and growing in several. Customers know Dell for its quality, value and execution.

      EMC is the de facto leader in many segments, has wonderful enterprise credibility, vmware and a broad channel representation.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Not the first time...

      Sun was hardly a PC company. The E10K had a cross bar switch, supported 16 partitions, and had more high availability features than anything else on the market. StorageTek was purchased to improve their storage line which was always a weak spot, something that continues today under Oracle. Sun owned all their IP too, and most PC companies do not. Aside from Java, Sun created Solaris and NFS. Where would storage be today without NFS? Dell on the other hand has created????

      The operating system was not free it was included in the price of the product. For every E10K sold $100K was transferred to SunSoft and that funded that development.

      Now the first time a PC company bought a systems vendor was Compaq. The acquired first Tandem and later DEC. Tandem was dying and DEC was well on its way. But it didn't end well for Compaq, and the same may happen to Dell. The debt load they are going to assume is going to be staggering. I bet many in EMC will bolt first chance they get.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Not the first time...

        The E10K was a Cray, or at least a large part of it.

        Sun tried to build ZFS based NAS systems that had a pretty interface, but failed in reliability.

        Jonathan Schwartz gave away Solaris and with that the last bit of IP.

        At the time new SPARC chips never took off and only burned a hole into R&D. Fujitsu probaly sold more T series Servers than Sun.

        STK had a loyal customer base and the 8500 tape library was brand new and market leading.

        Margins in tape were/are higher than disk.STK engineering left and with it the innovation.

        Sun was never interested in STK engineering. They were after STK's customer base. The logic was that Storage customers would surely need to buy servers sooner or later - hopefully Sun Servers.

        In Sun's view of the world Servers were here to stay, and the rest was peripheral. They were so desperate that they gave away Solaris, hoping someone would buy their servers. After all Solaris must surely run best on a Sun Server.

        Ironically, Customers are most loyal to storage and networking vendors as they are hardest to rip and replace. X86/64 Servers are commodities that share a lot with their PC heritage and There isn't much money to be made. Cisco have a lots of $$$, so they gave UCS a shot but failed in storage. So now Cisco has Network and Compute. Dell has compute and storage.

        IBM, HP and Oracle claim to have it all.

        Cisco will buy NetApp and become the latest member of the full stack vendors. Netapp have failed with Cdot and will become an even cheaper aquisition target.

        Dell have no $$$ left and customers are sick of EMC arrogance and prices. VMware could probably be their saviour, not EMC storage.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    EMC

    To be honest, the (piss poor) quality and extortionate cost of the EMC kit I've had the displeasure to use/support, compared with their competitors, makes me place zero value on the opinion of anyone who's complicit in running an EMC-only shop...

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