I'm just after reading Joe's letter to Data Domain employees.
Well, that's not true. I read it. Thought about it. Read it again. Had dinner. Watched some TV while thinking about it some more and now I'm back here.
Strip it down and to me it looks pretty simple.
Data Domain becomes a new backup and recovery business within EMC's Information Infrastructure portfolio. That portfolio shown on Joe's most recent slides, none of which I'm going to repost here, is now storage, security, cloud and content management with services running horizontally across all of them.
But let's zoom out and think bigger, and I'm just spit balling here, but it seems to me that Data Domain becomes a corner stone of an entire EMC Backup and Recovery division. Avamar, NetWorker, Data Protection Advisor, EDL and so on all moving into this division.
Maybe the brand for such an organisation is the Data Domain brand? I don't know. It's a great brand with a lot of juice to it and think of the possibilities.
All of that is just speculation on my part but if EMC were to arm Data Domain with EMC's existing technology resources, boost their R&D budget to typical EMC product division levels and send EMC's massive sales force out with Data Domain's current products under their arm, they would be in a position to leap up an entire energy level in the backup and recovery space and leave a lot of their current competition behind in the process.
This isn't about getting some tech it's about building the next great franchise in the Backup and Recovery market.
If Joe's talking about this becoming a Billion Dollar business then it also means getting someone to run it. Someone who might report directly to the CEO the way RSA, Content Management, Cloud, VMware and the EMC Storage Division do.
That's effectively a Backup and Recovery business unit with a leader who sits on the Executive Team, who has access to the EMC M&A machine, who's development team has access to EMC's now sprawling company wide R&D program but who gets to keep the existing culture intact.
The same way RSA, Content Management, Storage Products, VMware and Cloud all have their own unique view of what it means to be an EMCer.
Culture wise EMC is now one of the biggest melting pots in the IT industry. I can't go to a large EMC meeting without running into all sorts of people from all different places many of whom have transitioned to their current job via an acquisition.
It's cultural dispersal the Brownian Motion way and with every new influx of employees what it means to be an EMCer evolves into something greater than what it was.
There's a long game yet to be played but for Data Domain employees the offer appears to be as follows.
Be Data Domain with the other guy or be Data Domain++ as a product division of EMC.
