Since the announcement that Dell is buying EMC for $67 billion last month, I’ve been thinking a lot about what this deal means both to me and the vendors we use. Our business is largely an EMC shop for storage, and we use a variety of servers, switches and other products from HP, Cisco and a few others. Below are my musings on how this shakes out for some of the larger and more popular players in the enterprise IT space.
Since the announcement that Dell is buying EMC for $67 billion last month, I’ve been thinking a lot about what this deal means both to me and the vendors we use. Our business is largely an EMC shop for storage, and we use a variety of servers, switches and other products from HP, Cisco and a few others. Below are my musings on how this shakes out for some of the larger and more popular players in the enterprise IT space.
Cisco
Cisco’s UCS business has one really large customer. Care to guess who it is? That is right, the EMC VCE partnership accounts for 20%, or nearly $200M, of the UCS business. Dell and EMC have claimed that the VCE partnership will remain intact, but I think we all find that nearly impossible. Is Dell going to leave that $200M on the table in the long term? Not likely. Sure, it may be a slow burn, but it will happen. Can Cisco compete with the likes of Dell/EMC and HPE without having a player in the storage space?
Nutanix
Nutanix has a lot to lose here. It is unlikely that the strategic Nutanix and Dell partnership will be a useful long term to Dell. Instead, Dell will push EMC and VMware products. Nutanix and other vendors are likely knocking on Cisco’s door to be the next VCE. At a bare minimum, Nutanix will be forced to find another hardware OEM in the next few months. This marriage is likely to mean trouble for Nutanix as other HCI vendors seek to leverage this uncertainty.
Arista / Cumulus
Outside of the VCE partnership, EMC has been looking to leverage Arista networking for a while now. Dell has shown a willingness to embrace whitebox networking with some limited success. Will this spell the end of EMC’s embrace of Arista? I think a decent winner in this deal is Cumulus, which can run on top of Dell whitebox switches. If you buy into whitebox switching being the future, Cumulus may make that a reality finally.
VSAN / ScaleIO
The EMC Federation has been blasted for market confusion with competing products, and nowhere is this more apparent than VSAN and ScaleIO. Two different products, one controlling company, and huge amounts overlap. Will Dell leverage VSAN to go after the HCI market? They are, after all, now a full stack provider. Doing this may cannibalise the core EMC storage business. The “competition problem” from EMC still exists, only now it is much worse. The commodity value proposition is directly at odds with the core EMC storage value proposition.
Banks
As with most thing in life, in the end the guys who control the money always win. The Dell buyout of EMC is no different with Wall Street looking to rank in nearly a 700 million dollars from this deal. From fees paid to financial advisors like Morgan Standley to loan arrangements fees, the financial companies look to be a clear winner in this deal.
Alternative Hypervisors
Once of the benefits of the EMC Federation was that VMware operated largely independent of EMC. They were free to partner with many other storage vendors, not just EMC. Now that a server vendor owns VMware, will other hardware vendors be shopping to alternative hypervisors? This could lead to a large round of investments into alternative hypervisors. A strong VMware is a strong Dell. I suspect HP, redhat, and NetApp use this to drum up support for the Open Virtualization Alliance.
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