Understanding what we’re doing with Atmos

I suppose it’s inevitable that the EMC competitors would attack as EMC has decided to make things clearer by not being in the business of OFFERING Atmos as a service for any additional customers (it is staying up for existing users).

So – why did we do it?  Well – in basic terms, we made a mistake, and are correcting it.  (BTW – that’s **MY** view – another valid view is that it was a necessary step to get the ball rolling).

In more detail…

People had a hard mental time understanding whether EMC was positioning Atmos as a:

• An EMC PRODUCT - as a Virtual Appliance on top of traditional storage models, or as physical appliance designed for maximum scale and lowest cost.  OR….
• An EMC SERVICE – as Atmos Online.

Further – there was always a frustrating part of a conversation with any service provider potential Atmos customer where they would ask “are you competing with us?”  

The answer was simple “NO” – Atmos Online was always intended to be a proof-point of the technology, but part of being a proof-point of a cloud object storage technology was you needed to really be up and running (since big parts of the technology are things like the end-user portal, multi-tenancy and usage/chargeback models ).  But, this was a weird conversation, and you needed to have someone adept at talking to it.

Lastly – sometimes EMC’s own field would sometimes want to sell it as a service, which was a conflict of interest with the service provider, and seemed to rebut the point of whether we wanted to be a service provider.   

In retrospect, it was a mistake to stand up Atmos Online that EMC operated, and we should have always invested all our efforts in supporting public proof-points that were Atmos-powered.

So - things are more simple now, and Atmos is now more aligned with our core strategy and vision:

 

 

In this picture, Atmos is a supporting technology and product.  

Compute clouds (aka vCloud that compete with Amazon EC2) are powered by VMware coupled with supporting stacks like Vblocks, which are powered by transactional storage models, including scale-out and scale-up storage models build on commodity components that integrate with vSphere (VMAX, EMC Unified Storage).   For customers looking for “private cloud” versions of IT-as-a service, EMC works with partners such as VMware and Cisco to enable them to build compute clouds on their premise.

Storage clouds (aka Atmos-powered services that compete with Amazon S3) are powered by Atmos, which EMC sell as technology to people who want to offer cloud storage services.   Service providers like AT&T are offering that service.   EMC directs customers who want Atmos as a service to those partners.    For customers looking for “private cloud” versions of Atmos (which can federate to the public cloud variants), Atmos can be deployed on their premise as a Virtual Appliance or as a Physical Appliance.

I talked to one analyst yesterday about VDI and cost/scaling models, and this came up at the end.   Their view was this was good, simplified the go-to-market and clarified EMC’s position

What do you think - is that more clear?

Comments

[greg roody]

I think EMC did the right thing here. I never viewed AtmosOnline as anything more than a proof of concept,and while the Atmos partners I've dealt with never seemed to be threatened by it, it's probably best that the ambiguity is removed.

Competitors will always be looking for reasons to throw mud. It's kind of fun to watch sometimes, as long as I'm not the person wearing brown. ;)

[Jeramiah Dooley]

I agree with Greg. I don't know that it was ever an issue, but it was certainly a delicate discussion at times, and the less ambiguity the better.

Along these same lines, how does Mozy play into this discussion? I don't know that the same issue as Atmos exactly, but talking to service providers about IP-based backup-as-a-service when Mozy is doing much the same thing has also been a challenge, and one that hits far closer to home than cloud storage.

[Camberleyb]

Chad, Good summary on this and the world of Atmos.

[marc farley]

Chad, and the previous comment was weird too. I assume its spam, and am afraid to click the link with the poster's name. I doubt anybody would give you grief if you removed it.