Irreverence

posted on 16 May 2008 15:13

Talking to a dedupe man in the industry, a senior guy and we're kicking the EMC - Quantum thing around.

What he knows/believes is that EMC is going to take Quantum's DXi7500 as a head and layer it on top of EMC drive arrays. Likely there will be three boxes with VTL personalities and Fibre Channel access and they'll be sold into the small/medium enterprise market, the mid-tier, and the enterprise market against people like Data Domain - okay, that's fine - but also against Quantum and its DXi7500.

It's as if the two companies are deliberately designing in channel competition. Why? The man in the know says that Quantum's sales reps aren't to get given a list of stay-aways - EMC-owned accounts - or incented to sell with EMC. That's bizarre, if it's true.

But is it true? Rick Belluzzo, Quantum's CEO has been round the block a few times - HP, SGI, Microsoft - and surely knows channel selling principles back-to-front and sideways. EMC has had its channel problems in the past but Joe Tucci is one smart cookie and wouldn't set up a scheme that's going to bite his OEM supplier in the rear end - would he?

So we chewed it around and around and came up with two ideas:-

First, Quantum is going to go back to the OEM route. It's tried, it's tested, it works even if margins are thin. Second, Quantum is being lined up for a sale. It's got 60,000 tape automation customers who could be upsold onto disk-to-disk backup and the DXi boxes exist to be sold. Quantum hasn't had much success doing that but EMC might be able to do a better job and then sell these customers lots of other EMC storage products.

My conversational oppo' said Quantum is a near billion dollar revenue company with a horribly low market capitalisation making it affordable. He said the company sale idea was a wild surmise, which was true.

So, okay, it's probably not real but we both kept on coming back to this effectively designed-in channel conflict. Why would anybody do that?

Hey, it's Friday evening. I give up. All will be revealed in the Mandalay Bay hotel, casino and convention center next week in Las Vegas to the multitudes attending EMC World. Let's hope though that, in this case, what happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}