Recently back from EMC (News - Alert) World in Las Vegas it took me a little time to absorb all the information that was disseminated by the storage giant. In the two days that I attended I sat through what seemed like an un-ending procession of well-choreographed scripted keynote presentations longer than I ever thought even possible. My long forgotten college freshman humanities professor would have been astonished that I showed up for anything past the first of these sessions just as I had snubbed his lectures after attending the first one so many years ago. To be fair, to a great extent the talks were professional, had great visuals, some attempted humor and others even attempted audience participation. The venue was well laid out and well thought out as well. There were things to see, things to do, a little ballyhoo, a dash of hype and in the Solutions Pavilion what seemed like miles of booths paid for by companies hawking goods and services that complement EMC product lines.

Starting early and working my way through the Venetian casino through the maze of passageways to the Sands Convention center; (for this week it should have been more aptly named the SANs Convention Center) I found my way into Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci’s address. Mr Tucci began by diagraming EMC’s strategy and direction. He spoke about EMC’s four company focus for the coming year: EMC, VMware, Pivotal and RSA (News - Alert). It struck me as odd that although EMC by now a hardware stalwart much of his comments were directed at software. He spoke about last year’s spending, proclaiming that 12% of revenues were spent on R&D and a further 10% on new technology acquisitions – mostly on software companies, for a grand total of 22% of revenues. He segued into a brief discussion of software defined networks, open architecture, the software defined data center and vBlock. The private cloud, the public cloud and the hybrid cloud. Boldly proclaiming “we were at the crossroads of security and Big Data”. Hmm, sounded to me like a lot of talk about software.      

He was followed to the podium by Paul Maritz the CEO of Pivotal EMC’s latest acquisition who outlined the vision and strategy behind the joint venture between EMC and VMware. In short he declared Pivotal to be open source, open cloud, multi-centric – a developer that was Enterprise friendly. He spoke of data landing zones and data lakes. And cloud fabrics, the operating system for the cloud generation, coming to a Storage Area Network nearest you. Hmm, more talk about software

The afternoon keynote kicked off with Pat Gelsinger the CEO of VMware, who outlined VMware’s technology strategy to radically simplify IT what he dubbed “a new era” of “somoclobdat” - an acronym for social, mobile, cloud and Big Data. He spoke about the software defined data center, virtualized infrastructure and the progress being made to virtualize every data center. He concluded that the “network is the barrier to the software defined data center. The solution is to transform the network with virtualization.” Leading to “software defined storage”.

It was now that I realized that this was the first mention of storage –albeit defined by software - by any of the first three EMC keynoters. I actually went back and checked my notes. It was pretty shocking but perhaps it should not have been. It took almost three full hours of keynoters pitching and plugging before hardware, the company’s alleged bread and butter, was ephemerally mentioned. No dwelling on hardware here. No long lists of hardware features. No Gartner (News - Alert) capacity studies. No references to rotational speeds. No statements about hardware break-throughs in future. What became apparent to me was that EMC came to Las Vegas to talk about software – only software.    

The rest was anticlimactic, at least for me. Rick Denvenuti, the President of Information Intelligence Group a division of EMC spoke about “New Solutions: Delivered Transformation: Delivered” – “how to accelerate your journey to the cloud”. Amitabh Srivastava, President of EMC’s advanced software Division spoke of “The Power of Three” which covered topics like “the rise of the software defined data center” and how “EMC’s software solutions give you the power you need to drive greater efficiency and control, choice and agility in your IT infrastructure.” And finally closing out the second day Guy Churchward, President of EMC Backup Recovery Systems spoke about how to “Change the Game with EMC Backup Archive”, a rather long discussion, at the end of the day, about software services.

By this time I longed for a discussion of petabytes, zettabytes, rotational speeds and latency, concepts that come to mind to anybody who has ever mapped out a large array. But if anyone was discussing hardware I just didn’t hear it. It was pretty clear to me that in the new age of storage it’s not how much you can store, or even how fast you can access it but rather what you can do with the data you are storing.