Corporations by their very design are not transparent.
They're opaque.
This usually comes from the top down where corporate leaders have to watch what they do and say in public for fear of damaging shareholder return by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and such.
Some stuff you're not going to speak about can soon become a culture of a whole lot of things no one is willing to speak about.
"It's not the company way." "The Boss doesn't do that why should I?." A million and one other reasons for going into listen only mode. I think this happened to EMC some where along the line and the company became this big gap in the conversation where every thing said by everyone else was analyzed to death behind the castle walls but responses never came.
Over the past 18 months a bunch of us have been pushing not to make EMC transparent, that just won't work in a big company, but to make it translucent. With things you can see clearly, things which might not be so clear and things you can't see at all.
One of the internal payoffs of moving towards something like this that I've noticed is the fact that I can now read what EMC Research reads even though I'm not privy to the discussions they're having about what we've been reading. The research value being kept private but the education value made public. That's translucency in action right there.
Another example of translucency was the Innovation Showcase at EMC World, Steve has mentioned it since it was the debut of his new arrival but I though it might be interesting to have a look at some of the graphics used to explain the some of the projects on display.
What follows is just a subset of what was on display at the showcase in the same way that what was on display is just a subset of the larger research efforts being under taken by the company around the world. Hopefully the diversity will give you an idea of how many different things have been going on behind closed doors and make what was opaque (EMC does research!?!) become translucent.
Disclaimer: All graphics have been posted here with permission and what follows are research topics which have been pursued to the point where they are operational prototypes. These are not shipping products and should not be considered to be such. Now lets jump in.
-Application Aware Intelligent Storage
The common nonsense is that the functionality of the array controller can be commoditised to the point of non-existence. A return to the days of hopped up volume managers and lots of DAS. But is that what's really going to happen? The AAIS team think not.
-Project Daoli: Trusted GRID Infrastructure
You can guess why EMC is interested in GRID Infrastructure what with Fortress rising in different places around the planet.
-Project Futon
When the company started kicking around ideas to remove the PC as the gate keeper for digital media that was right about the time I realized they were serious about getting into the consumer electronics market. LifeLine and Iomega just sealed the deal.
-WARP
Your phone becomes the authentication point for a myriad of services you interact with every day. A Digital Key for your Digital Life.
-Centera with Data Lineage
Steve Todd has blogged in far more detail on this than I ever could since it's his baby but here are some graphics to go with his words.
There are more. Covering a lot of different topics. Everything from new hardware/software/services to design methodologies and new ways of interacting with customers but that's just too much to cover here.
This should give you an idea of what the thinking inside EMC is these days. Everything from developing AI for storage controllers to building consumer electronics devices to figuring out the answers to security questions both in your personal life and locked away in data centers connected across the globe.
And if I'd told you 18 months ago EMC would be showing you things it was working on at the prototype stage you probably wouldn't have beleived me.
But look what happens when you aim for the pragmatisim of translucency and not the perfection of transparency.
