SiliconANGLE

EMC’s M&A Strategy Dictates ExtremIO and Syncplicity to Become $1 Billion Businesses

Alex Williams — Thu, 24 May 2012 21:44:08 +0000

EMC guides its strategy according to what it calls its “triple play.” It serves as a framework to

run the company internally and guide its way in the market.

According to EMC CFO and Executive Vice President David Goulden,that means three things:

Make sure the business is growing in the overall market and increasing its market share.
Invest in the future.
Produce financial leverage.

The trick is to do all three at once.

It’s in this context that EMC models its acquisition strategy, Goulden said on theCube this week at EMC World.

Acquired companies need to be $1 billion businesses when they grow up. Most of the acquisitions do not have that much revenue so most of the growth internally has to be organic.

That puts XtremIO and Syncplicity in that category. Both acquisitions do represent fundamental technologies as companies move to the cloud and create, aggregate and share data. XtremIO is in the flash market and Syncplicity is in what can be loosely described as the cloud management market.

Goulden said in 2002 that EMC did $5 billion in revenues. In 2011, the company posted $20 billion. That $15 billion in growth can be in part attributed to its acquisitions and the organic growth they posted.

VMware did $3.7 billion in revenues last year, accounting for about 25% of that $15 billion.

“We are buying an asset we can develop,” Goulden said.

It’s an insightful viewpoint from one of the most powerful CFO’s in tech and widely considered as an heir to the throne now heldy by Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci.

The question: What company will EMC acquire next?

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In the same vein:

Fusion-io All About Flash Gaming, Drecom is Latest Client

Maria Deutscher — Thu, 24 May 2012 21:34:05 +0000

Flash storage giant Fusion-io has been tapping the gaming industry lately, releasing case study after case study covering various companies’ use of its ioDrive solutions. The newest is Drecom, a Japanese web portal that maintains social games in addition to mobile sites and other things such as RSS readers. The firm “Fusion-io’d” its database environment.

‘”We needed a solution that would allow us to enhance our MySQL environment to serve our rapidly-growing user base,” said Drecom IT Architect Senior Engineer Yusuke Saito. “No one wants to wait when they log on to play a game. With Fusion ioDrives integrated into our servers, players won’t see ‘server busy’ messages. Now, even millions of players can be sure to enjoy the user experience they expect online.”

About seven months ago another Japanese social media and gaming site operator, CyberAgent, decided to go with Fusion-io as well. The latter released a more detailed case study that looked into how CuberAgent has deployed the technology and its comparison with competing offerings, among other things.

More recently, Host Europe GmbH selected the company’s flash solutions to power its own database. The release went out earlier this month. Host Europe serves a large user base just like its peers – roughly a million – and provides yet another example of flash meeting big data. The growing amounts of unstructured data, the type produced by social interactions and in-game activities, is becoming an increasingly important asset for the enterprise, and a bigger and bigger burden on IT infrastructure at the same time. There’s a need to not only find better analytics tools, but also better equipment designed to handle modern workloads, and Fusion-io built its success on this trend.

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In the same vein:

Flash in the Cloud is Still Early in Innovation, Says Solidfire

John Casaretto — Thu, 24 May 2012 20:49:38 +0000

David Cahill, Director of Strategic Alliances for Solidfire made an appearance on theCube at EMCWorld 2012. Solidfire is a revolutionary player in the cloud architecture realm. As the only all-flash array product that is focused exclusively to the cloud service provider market, the Boulder, Colorado based company is on a trajectory to full general availability to that market and beyond. Dave Cahill’s interview video on theCube can be seen on SiliconAngle.tv (full clip below).

It is interestingly noted that EMC’s recent 430 million dollar acquisition of Xtrem I/O, serves as a validation of Solidfire’s technology and provides great reference to integration of scalability that is going on in the market. The push for next-gen solutions in EMC’s portfolio indicates that rather than throwing high IOPS devices around, the focus is coming around to architecting for scale. With this new set of design constraints in relation to scale in hand, it was clear EMC saw that retrofitting existing architecture would be insufficient. What EMC now has the option to integrate and offer is a portfolio of solutions such as VFCache, the upcoming Thunder project flash appliance, Xtrem I/O, and the legacy suite. With segmentation and focus on solutions it is a powerful amalgam of offerings unlike any other.

Cahill states that we are at the beginning of this innovation, and flash is a commodity component of this architecture. That is not to say it is not without precautions, because as Cahill state, without the ability to scale, the ability to provide efficiencies, the ability to integrate performance control, or the ability to provide automation, the drive behind the economics required to take this technology beyond the 2 to 3 percent of the market that demands it today is just not there. Those high demand clients that have super high IOPS requirements will always be there, but taking it beyond to a wider base requires cracking the code of economics in efficiency, automation, performance controls, and so forth and that requires great software.

Solidfire’s existing track is in the early access market where cloud service providers are engaged at this phase. As Solidfire’s products integrate into these provider offerings, it enables the transformation of IT as for this segment that is a cornerstone of their business. Their next-gen performance provides the ideal platform to implement new features to differentiate themselves from the pack in any number of ways. In these unique environments, IT is a profit center, not a cost and that classification is a facet of cloud services, where it is survival of the fittest in any case. Quality of services, cost of services, breadth of services – each if not differentiated from competitors features could mean a cloud service provider is out of business. So with that mandate, the focus is on delivering services to end customers, and not just turning knobs to an end user base, which is what traditional IT is all about.

Solidfire’s trajectory to the market continues in development and preparation for general availability at the end of the year. Their upwards charge to the market encompasses integrating services and corresponding features as the cloud services market goes beyond just hosting data, but reaches out into breadth of services, hosting applications, and always keeping up with comparison relative to leaders such as Amazon. In order for that to happen, a change in mindset is taking place, and that change includes new architectures and concepts.

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In the same vein:

VMware Extends Desktop Virtualization Portfolio with Wanova

Maria Deutscher — Thu, 24 May 2012 20:00:15 +0000

VMware signed an agreement to acquire an Israeli firm called Wanova, with the goal of enabling virtual desktop management on offline end point devices. This is according to a blog post from earlier this week by Scott Davis, the CTO of the virtualization giant’s VDI group.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed in the official release, but local publication Haaretz believes the transaction is worth approximately $100 million.

Wanova’s flagship product is Mirage, a replication and layering solution with one particular feature that evidently managed to draw VMware’s attention: the platform caches and executes images on the client side. View does the same thing only remotely, using a graphics protocol that requires an internet connection.

The company has plans to integrate Mirage with VMware Fusion, which will allow extend its portfolio’s reach to not online offline machines but also virtual OS environments.

Davis elaborated more on the actual software and why his company considered it to be a good enough investment:

“As a standalone product, Wanova Mirage broadens our EUC offerings by bringing many of the operational and centralized management benefits associated with VMware View to laptops and physical systems. This means both native user experience through local execution and disconnected access.

The benefits include push-button image restore/recompose with user state preservation, desktop DR, far more reliable patch management and a variety of migration use cases.”

Earlier this month EMC, VMware’s majority stakeholder, announced that it too has acquired a Middle-Eastern firm. The storage giant agreed to pay $430 million for ExtremIO, a maker of storage solutions that was in the very early stages of initial growth prior the merger.

SSD technology is one of the big highlights of this week’s EMC World gathering. Among other things, clients such as Goldman Sachs have been invited to demonstrate the advantages they’ve seen after upgrading in their infrastructures.

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In the same vein:

Fear and Opportunity Drive Big Data in Business, Says Tom Roloff

Bert Latamore — Thu, 24 May 2012 19:20:17 +0000

Big data is still in the strategy planning stage in most industries according to Tom Roloff, COO for EMC Consulting. But, he said in an interview in The SiliconAngle Cube from EMCworld 2012, companies are moving aggressively, and often fear is as much a motivator as business opportunity (see full video below).

“Everybody is worrying about ‘Are my competitors in my industry learning something that I’m not?’” he says. “There’s an element of ‘Can you tell me what other people in financial services are doing with big data because if they’re doing something I should be doing, I’d better find out about it quick.’”

Big data discussions with customers are almost always involve LOB management and the CIO in large enterprises. And they are vertical-industry centric since each vertical has its own set of business problems. As a result, about half of EMC’s consultants come out of a specific vertical industry, know the business issues of that industry, and only talk to business leaders in that vertical, and EMC Global Consulting is organized by vertical industries rather than territories. The other half are technology consultants that are horizontal and join the engagement after the initial business planning is finished.

Also, despite common belief, most of the business issues EMC consults on are not new problems. “So if you’re talking to a telco and the problem is customer churn, that’s been a problem with telcos forever. Or when a bank officer says, ‘I don’t know if the John Smith who has a brokerage account, the John Smith who has a bank account, and the John Smith who has a wealth management account is the same John Smith or three different John Smiths’, that’s been a problem in banking forever.”

Nor is data analysis a new idea for these industries. The telcos, for instance, have been analyzing their customer data almost since the days of Alexander Graham Bell.

What big data does is allow companies to expand the data set being analyzed far beyond just the rows and columns in their structured databases to include unstructured data inside the company and outside in the cloud, he said. “Now you can bring all that information together. It’s a massive amount of information. Then how do I get some insight out of all that information? Now it’s a technology problem. So these engagements merge business and technology problems.”

Mobile Computing

Big data is not the only major area of transformation concerning companies today. Mobile computing is another. “In banking in particular, huge amounts of effort are being spent right now on ‘How do I render information to users in the way they want to consume it, and how do I design a user interface and a way to interact with all that information in the right way.’”

So for instance he said EMC Consulting is working with a large credit card company on designing an e-wallet. The application is not challenging, “but ultimately we have to create the user interface for the iPhone, the iPad, etc., that you and I will ultimately be carrying around. There’s a strong conversation about what the user experience will be like and how we will enable the mobile worker.”

Cloud Computing

Global consulting is also excited about the opportunity in cloud development. This has three components, he said: people, process, and technology. Most companies are past the planning stage now and are implementing, which is a huge change from two years ago, when very few large industry CIOs even thought cloud was real – almost all those he talked to said it was all hype. “When I asked the 70 CIOs at our CIO Connect Event Monday who did not have a private cloud strategy, nobody raised their hand.”

And in the last year, the trend has shifted from private to hybrid cloud. In the annual Wikibon IT Transformation Survey, just completed, for instance, 37% of respondents indicated that they were building hybrid clouds, a huge jump from a year ago when only about 9% were considering hybrid.

Gartner has just published a report saying that by 2016, 50% of large corporate data, even in regulated industries, will be sitting in a public cloud, he said. “You say that to people today, and they say, ‘No way!’ But I think four years is way too long. I think it’s happening right now.”

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In the same vein:

U.S. State Department Hacks al-Qaeda Webpages

John Casaretto — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:44:44 +0000

An AP report has disclosed that the U.S. State Department launched the “hacking” of al-Qaeda sites in Yemen. The article states that propaganda on the web pages was reversed to show altered versions of the ads that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton describes as showing “the toll al-Qaeda attacks have taken on the Yemeni people”. The information replaced al-Qaeda propaganda regarding the killing of Americans. This marks a public confirmation that the US is utilizing a breadth of technology based offensive in addition to other means against its enemies.

This admission of covert cyber operations is unusual, and it indicates a fairly non-destructive tact of distributing information as opposed to any attacks or surveillance of any organization or government.

As the article describes:

“Clinton described the cyber effort as part of a larger, multipronged attack on terrorism that goes beyond attacks like the Navy SEAL raid that killed Usama bin Laden to include the propaganda battle, and the longer, slower campaign of diplomats working alongside special operations troops to shore up local governments and economies and train local forces.”

Clinton also stated that the attack was launched by the Center for Strategic CounterTerrorism Communications, a group that includes diplomats, special operators, intelligence analysts, some of whom no doubt have hacking skills and experience. A component of the group’s mission is as Clinton states:

“Together, they will work to pre-empt, discredit and outmaneuver extremist propaganda,”

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In the same vein:

EMC President Pat Gelsinger Materializes Data Infrastructure in theCube at EMC World 2012

Kit Dotson — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:13:05 +0000

Pat Gelsinger, President and Chief Operating Officer of EMC, dropped into theCube at EMC World 2012 to speak with John Furrier and Dave Vellante—he visits every year at EMC World and always brings a lot of interesting insights into the moving-and-shaking projects at EMC. This time he sat down with the intrepid pair to talk about the future of the market, flash storage, and even analytics.

Vellante mentioned that EMC’s portfolio has transformed across the board with acquisitions, Isilon, flash, and software.

“Clearly with the acquisition of XtremIO, as we understand the taxonomy of the industry today, we have all the pieces we need,” said Gelsinger. “But far be it for me to say that we’ve ended innovation in this space at that level. So, I’ll never say never: we haven’t cornered the market on new innovative ideas but at least we understand the taxonomy now. We got the pieces we need, period.”

He went on to explain how all the products that EMC has gathered tie together in a synergy that deliver not just fabric, connectivity, storage, and analytics, but also the availability to mean that all EMC products are extensions of each other. A customer can grab ahold of one product and then look around the portfolio and discover that if they want to upgrade sideways or expand their project, there it is already in EMC’s inventory and it fits right in for them.

Furrier asked Gelsinger to speak about “frictionless data movement” and what’s called data viscosity or otherwise and understanding of how much analysis and business methodology is tied up in not just access but being capable of making sure data is where it is when it’s needed. Gelsinger sees the metaphor as a “data pool” instead of a data island, how private silos are a thing of the past, and that what’s important is virtualizing the data.

Now people don’t just need to store that data, but they need to store it with context and they need to be able to protect it. All of these elements mean that the raw data is just as important as the metadata attached to it as well as the application path for moving it from place to place or accessing it for analysis. All of these elements come together with EMC products in not just providing storage for massive amounts of data but rapid, protected availability.

EMC as a disruptive player in the data center infrastructure market

“What is it? We view our vision as centering around three things: cloud, big data, on a foundation of trust…” says Gelsinger. “And we see those things becoming the foundations for data and IT of the future. It is being the most disruptive player for data center infrastructure writ large.”

He sees EMC as wanting to be the primary data center infrastructure provider for everyone from big to small, enterprise IT, and even on-the-ground solutions.

“We are a products and technology company, 17,000 engineers,” he continues, “and we’re going to keep growing our engineering capacity. We’re going to increase our percent R&D over time.”

EMC has been huge in acquisitions and successful choices over the past few years. We’ve seen them grow from a storage company into an all-in-one infrastructure company who don’t just provide solutions, but bring together other companies who offer hardware, software, communication, and products that organically blur together.

Impact on niche communities

Gelsinger says that through all the different markets he saw two that were very ad hoc and extremely unstructured: the university (academic) community and the startup community. So EMC took a hard look at those cultures and started up projects to align to them.

He says that they started platforms that would cater to their needs, workshops to explain how they could use data infrastructure products to aid their missions. While much of both of these cultures work from the basis of people and they also often produce a great deal of data—generally with very low budgets in the beginning looking at academic—meant that it was a good place for EMC to insert themselves into the smaller niche aspects of big data and storage.

Click here for a slideshow of images from the interview

EMC culture and Gelsinger on “being a cool global company”

“In successful companies cultures are never static, you have to keep moving them forward, changing them, evolving them,” says Gelsinger. “I think we really have evolved as a leader and a much cooler place to participate in. As a thought leader in the industry we’re on the leading edge of the cloud, we’re on the leading edge of big data.

“But the next layer of the transformation really about is about being a global company. With all the success we’ve had with expanding the company success globally, I have to be as cool in Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao, Bangalore, São Paulo, etc. I have to be seen as a cool leader in all of those places as well.

“I think we’ve gone from East Coast to a broad data center play,” he continues, “and the next phase for us is to really be a cool global company.”

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In the same vein:

Precog’s Raises $2M for Drag ‘N Drop Analytics Interface

Maria Deutscher — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:40:10 +0000

This week a startup called Precog that it received $2 million in a first round of funding led by RP Ventures, only three months after it came out of stealth at the Strata conference.

The company offers a cloud-based platform that analyzes the unstructured data streams a developer is tapping into, such as social media interactions and geotagged activity. It then allows the user to translate the real-time results that the system produces into new capabilities: everything from shopping recommendations to more behind-the-scenes functionality such as reporting.

At the same time, the time investment that this would normally require is dramatically reduced thanks to a drag and drop panel that covers most aspects.

The really interesting part, however, is the integration. Precog offloads the streams associated with the entity data in a customer’s database to its own servers for analysis, and as a result can support almost every use case and an equally long list of programming languages. A developer can use the service’s REST API to integrate with data sources such as Twitter, while incorporating the service into a mobile app, we application or a backend system.

“For an investor who spent 20 years building data-centric infrastructure businesses, seeing something shiny in big data’s murky waters was an epiphany,” said Kirill Sheynkman senior director of RTP Ventures. He is joining Precog’s board of directors alongside SendGrid CEO, Jim Franklin.

The offering is currently in beta, and evidently already managed to impress a few VCs in addition to an initial customer base. Precog calls itself the world’s first data intelligence-as-a-service, and is based on a subscription model that allows users to choose from different performance and capacity options. The same functionality is available with all plans, which range from 100 free megabytes to deployments in excess of one terabyte.

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In the same vein:

EMC CTO Discusses the Current State of Big Data

Josette Rigsby — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:01:54 +0000

The Cube is providing continuous coverage of EMC World 2012 being held in Las Vegas May 21 – 24. The Cube’s Dave Vellante sat down with Bill Schmarzo, CTO Enterprise Information Management and Analytics, EMC. Schmarzo said two activities at EMC World are consuming his time – speaking to analysts and speaking to customers. According to Schmarzo, the analysts he has spoken with have different perspectives about big data. Analysts more focused on data sciences report market enthusiasm about the ability to tap into new data sources and discover new market opportunities. However, analysts from the traditional business intelligence space report a significant amount of market uncertainty about big data and the new tools like HBase and Hadoop that have emerged to support it.

Schmarzo said he has also observed the angst from technology leaders afraid of making a bad decision regarding big data. Many times these leaders are so concerned with making a misstep that they become completely paralyzed and do nothing. Schmarzo continued by saying, “Many are more focused on making mistakes than on making game changing moves.” Dave Vellante supported his assessment adding, “The new big data culture has to be a let’s try it culture. You’re going to get it wrong.”

Schmarzo and Vellante went on to discuss the trend of companies attempting to create long-term big data strategies. Both agreed that this is somewhat a wasted effort. The market is simply moving too fast and evolving too significantly to allow planning three years or five years out. The market in three years will likely be radically different from the market today. When asked how he advises companies on getting started with a big data strategy, Schmarzo said he encourages companies to just stick their foot in the water – pick a business problem and then understand how new data sources and technologies like Hadoop can help uncover new insights that will help drive business value. Start with one problem and evolve gradually.

Schmarzo continued to explain that although Hadoop is wildly popular big data does not equal Hadoop. A richer ecosystem of tools exists to help businesses meet their goals. Hadoop does what it does well, but there are many more options available. Companies need to understand what they are attempting to accomplish and then select the right tools to help them meet their goals. Companies need to think holistically about their big data architecture.

The discussion concluded with an examination of the disconnect between the traditional business intelligence market and the new world of big data. In many ways, the business intelligence market is about looking back. Schmarzo said that although some see business intelligence as a failure, the technology accomplished what it was designed for. However, modern businesses require more real-time and predictive analytics and the capability to access external and unstructured data sources something that business intelligence is well suited for.

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In the same vein:

Android’s Google Play Faces Rising Competition from Amazon, Facebook and China

Saroj Kar — Thu, 24 May 2012 16:04:37 +0000

Android’s open nature allows its users to find thousands of applications not only on Google Play, but also through alternative markets that offer different services and promotional offers. And Google Play’s main rival, the Amazon Appstore, has made a name for itself by doing things differently than Android’s official market. The Appstore offers daily deals, curated apps and other interesting features not found on Google Play, and this week Amazon began rolling out its Test Drive feature, which will allow users to try out apps before downloading or buying.

The Appstore currently supports testing of more than 5,000 Android apps, and is enabled for more than 16,000 Web apps. If users have a compatible smartphone, they can first try simulating the app on their phone before deciding whether they want to buy it.

“The more we remove friction for customers who want to try apps, the more apps they will try. Those customers are more likely to find apps they are excited to download,” Amazon said in a post on its Appstore developers blog. “In this way, Test Drive helps customers understand the value of premium apps and helps drive downloads of freemium apps.”

Amazon said the test drive feature will be activated on selected compatible smartphones, and will be available for free for users who upgrade their phone with the latest version of Amazon Appstore for Android.

“Amazon brings the Test Drive experience to Amazon.com and Android phones using the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers,” Amazon said. “When customers click the Test Drive button, we launch a copy of the app on EC2. As customers interact with the app, we send those inputs over the phone’s Wi-Fi Internet connection to the app running on Amazon EC2. Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to the customer’s computer or phone. All this happens in real time, allowing customers to explore the features of the app as if it were running locally on their mobile device.”

The blog post goes on to note that apps requiring Java Native Interface (JNI), keyboard, multi-touch, microphone, camera, gyroscope, near-field communication or GPS are not part of the test drive feature, but soon will be included in the upgraded test drive releases.

Google doesn’t offer such lucrative services and deals or app testing to the emerging mobile platform; they are just concentrating on the increased availability of Android applications. Users can ask for a refund only once within 15 minutes from downloading the app from Google Play. We can only hope that Google Play soon introduces more consumer-centric features, which they’ll have to do if they want to remain competitive.

Facebook Upgrades App Center for Mobile

Shortly after its IPO filling Facebook announced the latest development in its forthcoming App Center for mobile apps. The company blog post said that developers can now use the Facebook App Center platform to place their apps, and iOS and Android users have streamlined options to install apps via the platform, either through their computer or mobile devices.

“Facebook sends over 160 million people to mobile apps each month through news feed and timeline,” Facebook software engineer Brent Goldman wrote in a blog post this week. “Soon, with the App Center, it will be easier than ever to drive mobile app installs and reach the over 500 million people using Facebook on mobile devices.”

The App Center is available from Facebook’s iOS app, Android app and mobile website m.facebook.com.

The move will allow developers to better integrate mobile apps with the Facebook platform, and will also provide them a stage to incorporate Facebook login on their apps. This will give the Facebook app experience some structure, as users will have the control to download apps, rate apps and get to know some detailed information about the apps before buying or downloading.

This could also help Facebook’s larger mobile strategy, as the social network could add more mobile users, which will help the company to target monetization through a budding ecosystem across mobile devices.

For installing apps from a mobile device, you can follow Goldman’s instructions as posted on the blog:

“All apps built for iOS, Android, and the mobile web have a “Send to Mobile” button on their app detail page. Once people click “Send to Mobile,”” they’re logged into your app and we immediately send a Facebook notification to their mobile device. By clicking the notification, they’ll be redirected to your mobile web app or the respective install page in the Apple App Store or Google Play.”

China Mobile App Store – An alternative to Google Play

Google Play service isn’t yet available in China because of censorship concerns, despite the fact that more than two-thirds of the smartphones sold in China run on Google’s Android OS.

China Mobile Ltd. saw that as an opportunity, opening its Mobile Market store for Android apps in 2009. Since then, the app store has gained 158 million registered users and more than 630 million apps have been downloaded, making it world’s largest carrier-operated app store.

“Without having to compete with the official Google store, China Mobile has an opportunity that operators in other countries don’t have,” said Kent, a London-based analyst. “China Mobile’s relationship with subscribers leaves it well- placed to take advantage.”

China is a huge market for any mobile vendor. Smartphone shipments are projected to increase 52 percent this year to 137 million units, according to a March estimate from market researcher IDC.

China’s censored web content and online stores selling apps, games and e-books are helping local players to drive and promote their other businesses.

“If a developer makes a very good app, then it will help boost traffic on our network and help our growth that way,” said China Mobile’s Chief Executive Officer Li Yue.

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