Dell and EMC together

I’ve been asked a few times about the Dell/EMC merger/acquisition, I can say nothing, not because of financial or security regulations, but because I know nothing at all. Although it was clear some changes were afoot at Dell, the announcement came as a surprise to me.

A couple of things are amusing though in the industry analysis. The most amusing is the quotes coming out of other industry based organizations and their CEO’s. This is a classic of it’s kind, on the Register about Meg Whitman at HP, and then this one from Dietzen the CEO at Pure.

This moves comes out of ‘weakness, not strength’, claims CE Dietzen

Wouldn’t it be great if instead of this entirely predictable FUD a confident CEO would say something to the effect of

The acquisition will be challenging, but we welcome the increased competition and are sure customers and businesses will recognize and continue to benefit from the great products we already have, and those on our roadmap.

Of course no one would ever actually say that, one it doesn’t make headlines, and two because well…

The other thing that’s been disappointing is that other Dell trope, you can’t use Apple products. See as an example The Register:

I have one thing to say to MacBook users at EMC: Whoops

I have to say, I’m always surprised when I hear this kind of thing. Seriously, while I’m sure Michael Dell would prefer everyone use a dell tablet or laptop, I’m sure he’d rather have the most talented, productive people and being acquired and having to use new apps is enough of a productivity hit. Why on earth would he want to want to make it worse by enforcing a move of hardware, software and app paradigms. FYI there are a number of people in Dell Software Group, especially from the Quest acquisition, that have been using Apple products since the Quest acquisition.

O’Reilly Webcast – Extending Cassandra for OLAP

Colleague Randy Guck, who leads our open source Doradus project, recent gave an O’Reilly Webcast on the project and using Doradus to extend Cassandra for high performance analytics.

The discussion on how Doradus leverages Cassandra, its data model and query language, the internal architecture and the concept of storage services gave in-depth background to then understand the Doradus OLAP service and how it provides near real-time data warehousing.

Randys’ slides and webcast can be fund here. It does need registration, but is well worth the effort. The webcast was sponsored by Dell, which was entirely coincidental, since it was for a Hadoop services offering. Doradus offers some interesting ways to extend and use Cassandra and Randy covers most of them in the webcast. The key point is, that Doradus is an open source project, use and source code are free. Details on Doradus are in this blog entry.

Case story for Dell Software and Hardware

I’ve not posted much of late as I’m working on a lot of back office and process stuff, but still working in Dell Software Group. I recently attended the annual Dell Patent Award dinner where I was able to catch up with Michael Dell and my boss, John Swainson as well as a few other executives, as well many of the great innovators and inventors.

My former boss and Dell Vice President, Gerry Hackett made an interesting point in her remarks prior to doing the roll call for her team at the dinner, she said to the effect that Dell was going to be the only integrated solution provider. I was surprised, but thinking it through she was right.

When I saw this customer story about San Bernardino County School district, I thought it was worth linking here.

Dell Software Official Site – Simplify IT Management

We’ve released our latest web presence for the Dell Software group, it’s got direct download links, try and/or buy, easy to find information and more.

Dell Software Official Site – Simplify IT Management | Mitigate Risk | Accelerate Results.

software.dell.com

I’ve been slacking on blog posts for a while, my Ironman training has been the main reason, time outside work has just vanished as I approach my final ironman distance triathlon in July. Also, increasingly I’ve been internally focussed on a number of key projects as well, are busy creating the real Dell Software Group, out of some fabulous acquisitions. While Dell Software Group has existed for over a year, given the staff and products largely have come from only acquisitions with a number of us moving over from what we fondly refer to as “legacy dell”, we are really starting to see a coherent software business emerge, rather than individual businesses.

Website: One of the big steps in the maturity of the Dell Software group is the launch of our very own software website, and the re-organization of the Dell Social Media properties around software. I’m jumping the gun officially, but the new Software.dell.com is now live.

Twitter: Twitter handles will be shifting around as well. In one of those “you can’t get there from here” things, changing twitter handles isn’t so easy if you want to retain existing followers. To that end, the existing Dell Software will be repurposed for the real @dellsoftware, but since our biggest twitter following is currently on @quest, we will are renaming @dellsoftware to @dellswnews, then renaming @quest to @dellsoftware. Simple… interested in Dell Software, follow @dellsoftware from now…

I’ll post a few other updates with some news on products, awards etc. that I’ve missed in the last few months in the next few days. ++Mark.