Tag: emc

Dell Avoids Aster and Dodges a 296 Million Dollar Mistake

Another one bites the dust as Teradata has acquired Aster Data for a reported $263 million.  This represents 89% of Aster Data shares as Teradata already owned 11% of Aster bringing the true acquisition cost to $296 million or $275 million after subtracting Aster’s $21 million in cash.  In any case, that’s a lot of money for a company of Aster’s age and size.

For Teradata this acquisition makes sense as they continue to compete against HP (Vertica), IBM (Netezza), EMC (Greenplum), Oracle, and SAP (HANA).  Teradata is faced with an age-old question for technology companies; hold on to their proprietary ways of the past or reach for the open and commoditized ways of the future.  It is not clear to me which direction Teradata will choose. However, it is clear to me that, unlike Dell, Teradata is the right company in the right industry to make such a gamble on Aster; the database guru’s at Aster, Tazo Argyros and Mayank Bawa, will find themselves at home within the halls of Teradata.

While I applaud Dell for continuing to blaze their own path, it seems others within the technical community are harder to please.  Per Gigaom’s Stacey Higginbotham’s article posted on March 3, 2011:

“So for Dell, and any other big data wannabes out there, the only proven options left to
start fulfilling this niche are ParAccel, Infobright, and Ingres’s VectorWise Platform.”

I’d hardly call Dell a “big data wannabe” and perhaps some have misconstrued their attempted acquisition of 3Par as a precursor to Dell entering this space.  In fact, Dell has been quite clear that any software acquisitions must have an impact on their strategic lines of business.  While Aster and other big data start-ups have the potential of driving Dell’s server and storage sales, their valuations and competitive landscapes make them a risky move for Dell.

Dell is quickly becoming the king of “Cloud Neutrality” as they are providing key pieces of the solution to their customers while working with various infrastructure providers such as Juniper, Cisco, and more. By purchasing disruptive Cloud software companies within the areas of management, orchestration, security, and monitoring, Dell could further their leadership in this market.  Think the completion of UEC; very exciting!

Since I’ve never started a billion dollar company from my dorm room, I’ll defer to Michael Dell to make the right moves for his company.  Perhaps they’ll enter the big data market with a smaller software acquisition and integrate it into other cloud offerings thereby indirectly attacking the market.  For now, Teradata has gotten a bit stronger while Dell has avoided a $296 million mistake.

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Cloud Wars: Cisco Invades OpenStack

Simply put, Cisco is an amazing company.  Love them, hate them, fear them, or fight them, but always respect them.  While other large companies such as IBM and GE have “reinvented” themselves, few have done so prior to having a profound downturn in either market share and/or stock prices.

With an innocent blog post by Lew Tucker, Cisco VP and CTO of Cloud Computing, Cisco has invaded OpenStack under the guise of Networking.  Remember, OpenStack was founded by NASA and Rackspace and currently has over 45 members with the mission of providing open source software to build public and private clouds.  However, none of OpenStack’s members have the shear size or market power of Cisco.

In his post (http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-joins-openstack-community/) Lew writes:

In our view, dynamic provisioning of the network and network-based services is an essential element of cloud computing…

…To achieve this, we believe that it is best to join with others from across the industry to work on open technologies and that open source is the ideal way to reach developers and learn from the community…

My Take, Cisco is spending billions of dollars to insure their continuing dominance in networking and Cloud computing.  By joining OpenStack, Cisco gains visibility into OpenStack’s interworking as well as the ability to influence the direction and speed of the project itself.  As an added benefit, Cisco will learn from the community while having the ability to reach a set of talented developers that otherwise may never have engaged with Cisco.

Clearly, Cisco understands how to build complex partnerships across competitive lines.  While VMware has vCloud, do they not work with other server vendors?  Would EMC not sell a SAN to an HP customer?  As a server vendor, Cisco is learning that choosing neutrality over products has its benefits especially when it comes to software.

While OpenStack is “hot” and an interesting project, they have their competitors as well with more coming. It remains to be seen if,  “a collection of open source technologies delivering a massively scalable cloud computing operating system” is supportable and useable by mainstream Administrators and Enterprises.  Perhaps this is what VMware is betting on with their vCloud solution.

One final note, where are the Operating System Vendors in this fight? Yes, Ubuntu is currently packaging applications like OpenStack and Eucalyptus but we need an integrated Cloud Operating System, not simply a collection of applications.  Microsoft, Red Hat, Apple, anyone….