ga('create', 'UA-8390828-1', 'auto'); ga('send', 'pageview');
EMC recently announced that they were buying out most of Cisco’s interest in VCE with Cisco only retaining a 10 percent stake in the company. VCE published that they would keep their mission intact, and continue to create new solutions using their industry-leading VBlock Systems. EMC has also made headlines lately for being nominated as one of the “World’s Best Multinational Workplaces,” and for some speculation that they may be planning a reorg, which may include the formation of a new cloud business unit.
What Does The EMC Transition Mean for VCE?
While there are always different rumblings of opinions throughout an industry, many analysts maintain that the VCE transition towards becoming an EMC business is an entirely natural one, and will probably help to skyrocket their growth. In the cio-today.com article “EMC Buys Cisco’s Stake in VCE, Eyeing Hybrid Cloud Potential” analyst Zeus Kerravala from ZK Research explained that joint ventures are only meant to last for certain period of time.
Kerravala said “If VCE Is going to earn billions more, they are obviously going to have to find a way of growing beyond organic growth. That will probably be through mergers and acquisitions or a change of channel strategy, and it’s going to require making faster decisions.” He went on to say that since there will now be streamlined decision making under EMC, he believes it’s a good move for VCE.
Our Take on the VCE Transition to EMC
With a big industry move like this one, we wanted to talk to IDS Chief Technology Officer, Justin Mescher, and get his take on the VCE transition. Mescher explained that the move might help solidify previous marketplace suspicions.
He said,“Ever since VMware acquired Nicira in 2012 and created their own software-defined networking stack, speculation has been swirling that EMC, VMware, and Cisco would start to grow further apart. While this move seems to confirm the rumors, I think it will be a positive move overall.”
Mescher went on to explain that VCE’s biggest value has been bringing fully validated and pre-integrated systems to customers to accelerate time to value, reduce risk and increase efficiency, and that mantra of the offerings shouldn’t change.
He explained that it will be interesting to see is how the recent EMC re-structuring to create a Cloud Management and Orchestration group will impact this acquisition. EMC has proclaimed that this new business unit will focus on helping customers work in both the private and public cloud independently of the technology running underneath it. This will include EMC’s “software-defined” portfolio as well as some of their new acquisitions targeted at cloud enablement and migration.
Concluding his thoughts, Mescher said,“Could EMC take the framework and concept that VCE made successful and start to loosen some of the vendor-specific requirements? While this would certainly not be typical of EMC, if they are serious about shifting from a hardware company to focusing on the software-defined Data Center, what more impactful place to start?”
About VCE
VCE was started in 2009 as a joint venture between three of the top IT industry companies, EMC, Cisco and WMware as an effort to provide customers integrated products solutions through a single entity. In 2010 VCE introduced their Vblock Systems which provided a new approach to optimizing technology solutions for cloud computing. Since then they have continued to grow their customer portfolio and improve their solutions and be a leader in the industry. See the complete VCE history.