The merger of Dell and EMC stems from the rise of cloud computing | Hacker News Reader

The merger of Dell and EMC stems from the rise of cloud computing

economist.com

50 pointsjimsojim14 comments

Although this merger seems to be mostly about infrastructure, I wonder how it will impact applications groups (documentum, captiva, etc) within the organization - there doesn't really seem to be a well defined place for them

(disclosure - I've spent most of my career competing with documentum, but I'm not anymore - I'm genuinely interested to see where they end up)

I'd say they are going to find it very difficult.

"The next step... is to merge the different components by using basic computers and have software turn it into servers, storage devices or routers as needed."

This statement is rather enticing because I have been executing this exact process for years using one of the free, open source kernel/userland options available for download. The "OS" is kept small and runs entirely in RAM. Works well enough for my purposes.

It is also interesting to juxtapose this statement against the usual negative comments on HN anytime the discussion turns to building home routers using "basic computers".

But maybe the meaning of "basic computers" by the journalist here is not what I think it is.

In this context, "basic computers" means Commodity/Off The Shelf. Instead of buying some high-end "enterprise" server from Sun / HP / Dell, using a regular cheap (enough) box and lots of them. This started with servers, but you now see standard x86 boxes being turned into high-speed packet processors ("routers") instead of paying someone like Cisco $15k for a switch.

Well it was nice knowing all you Dell employees!

They tried this before with Ionix (ugh) and it was an unmitigated disaster. At the same time they bought Spring, and had absolutely no idea what to do with it, so they spun it off. Anyone who says that Joe Tucci has a good track record of acquiring companies and letting them go about their business doesn't know what they are talking about.

Given that the company will be led by Michael Dell, I don't think it's the Dell employees that need to worry about their jobs.

I think anyone inside of Dell whose area of responsibility is a core focus of EMC (storage, security, etc.), should worry quite a bit about their jobs.

Absolutely. EMC is known for having some of the most ruthless sales people in the industry and the existing DELL ones will not stand a chance. I can speak from experience that this is true.

Tucci is being acquired, not acquiring Dell. Maybe your view still stands despite that - I don't have any views on Tucci personally (I know nothing about his track record).

That depends. I have seen a some acquisitions where the CEO of public company wants to go private and delist and a lot smaller firm buys him out using debt. Not on such scale though.

Spring is still wholly owned by EMC (and thus, Dell) through Pivotal. Boot and Spring Cloud is seeing a renaissance in its adoption and evolution. It was hard for VMware to know what to do with it previously because the whole vFabric and Cloud Foundry thing was Paul Maritz' brainchild - not part of traditional VMware culture or mindset.

Tucci has a track record of making some very good acquisitions (VMware, XTremIO, Isilon, DSSD, etc) and incubating new ideas (Pivotal). He needs to retire though, and this the Federation needs a new head to keep this ship aloft. Will it work? Who knows! Elliott meant they had to do something.

Not sure i get the cloud play here, are they trying to cater to people building their own private clouds, or are they planning to start from scratch and build an AWS competitor ?

Either plan seems like a poor one for 67B.

The former: private cloud all from one shop. Don't forget that Cloud Foundry is sitting right there next to them ;).

Yet another cloud giant. The competition is over that direction. However, this is more to the Capex side. IBM moves to the services, Google and MS, as well. We will see how it will become.

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