There has been a bit of a skirmish in the enterprise storage industry of late, certainly as is relates to HDS.
We currently have a reseller in the form of Sun Microsystems (or is that Oracle Microsystems?) and they have very much been in the news recently. We (Hitachi) also have an OEM arrangement with HP, and after Dave Donatelli’s departure from EMC to join HP as head of their storage and server business, that created a bunch of news as well. And, quite seriously, we do a fair amount of business through these two partners.
But recently the media, the pundits, the analysts, and the guy at my local coffee shop, all seem to think that this spells doom and gloom for HDS and Hitachi storage in general. The reasoning goes a little like this:
If Oracle consumes Sun, Mr. Ellison will decide to dump HDS as a partner in preference of his highly invested Pillar Data Systems or existing Sun midrange storage. Another “theory” is that Oracle will remain a software-only company and will divest itself of storage altogether. There are many more conspiracy theories here, but the common conclusion is that HDS is toast as far as storage and Sun is concerned.
Then we have the Donatelli story. Decent guy, smart guy, and very capable guy, I’ve met him and like him, but he suddenly (or at least it appears sudden) decides to bolt to HP. OMG!! What’s that going to do to Hitachi storage!! I had to chuckle at Dave Vallente’s blog on this (it’s a very good one and a must read; great insight). But he had a comment (the source of my chuckle) that said: Hitachi must be freaking out a bit– what a month; one OEM gets acquired by a Oracle who just wants to commoditize all hardware and your other OEM just put the dreaded enemy in charge– yikes!
But we were all quite surprised here. Should we be “freaking out”? We weren’t, at least I wasn’t, nor were any of my colleagues here. We were acting just like everyone else was, which was crowding around the water cooler and theorizing what all this meant. We even canceled our “Should We be Freaking Out” meeting.
So let me digress for a moment. Confession: I’m a dyed-in-the-wool BMW guy. I’ve had a few and I can give you a long list of why. There are many other great cars out there, from great car companies, but I’ve just settled in on BMW. Now let’s say that my local BMW dealership (we’ll call him Bob’s BMW to protect the innocent) decides to suddenly become “Bob’s Trabant”. Would I suddenly be driving a Trabant (sorry, with all the consternation going on in the auto industry I picked a brand that is not only defunct, but one we can still make fun of)? If Bob doesn’t want to sell me my next BMW, I’ll go to Julio’s BMW in the next town. Really!!!
Let me also give you some HDS history to back up my claim. Hitachi used to have two distributors in Europe. One was (the current) HDS, the other was Comperex. Someone, at some point, decided which company got to operate in which country. They basically split the continent in half. I visited Comperex once in December, 1999 at their headquarters in Mannheim, Germany. Nice meeting with nice people but then a few weeks later a similar crisis struck!! Suddenly, in February 2000, the announcement came that Comperex would now be a reseller for EMC, not Hitachi. Did Hitachi suddenly lose half of Europe? Hardly. What happened next was HDS started setting up sales offices in hotel rooms in previously Comperex countries (we’re now well beyond the local Holiday Inn’s and occupy legitimate offices). The end result was that Hitachi storage really didn’t skip a beat. Customers that were used to buying Hitachi storage from Comperex just went to HDS and bought the storage from us. It was a scramble, but the transition went smoothly under the circumstances.
The point is that customers buy the storage they want and the cars they want. If they want to buy Hitachi storage, they will. If they want to buy EMC storage, they will. And if they want to buy IBM storage, ditto.
So whatever you read about the Oracle thing or the Donatelli thing, getting “conspiracy” on its impact on Hitachi storage is premature.
We’re doing, and will continue to do, just fine.
Back to the water cooler to catch up on the latest conspiracy rumors. Wonder what’s next…..
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