Big Data Appliances On Broadway

The lights dim,  voices hush.  On stage, as if in a Broadway show, EMC's arsenal of steel, blades, and disk drives are lined up ready to come to life at a moment's notice.   Big Data was bigger than life.  I was sucked into the drama, sitting on the edge of my seat.  It was EMC's Analyst Day and Announcement Spectacular in New York City.

Imagine all the hype and drama attributed to data, lots and lots of data--Big Data.  Reminding us all that information is being created at lightning speeds and is coming at us like a monsoon.  But not just for Enterprise! VNXe for SMB! Isilon Appliances for unstructured content and OneFS! Big Data for All!  But wait! Something is  missing.  Where is the EMC Greenplum Data Compute Appliance (DCA)? What? All this fanfare and no DCA?  I was crushed.  It was like going to see Led Zeppelin and having Robert Plant on stage without Jimmy Page.

This is going to be a good year for Big Data and Big Data Appliances.    And yet the DCA wasn't on stage.  So what does this say? Companies like Aster Data, Vertica, and ParAccel would have loved the opportunity for a role on Broadway--even as an understudy--a shot at the big lights, the attention, the media blitz.  Not to mention HP and Microsoft's partnership, IBM's acquisition of Netezza, and let's not forget the big elephant in the room, Oracle.  With more than 40 EMC product announcements, maybe there wasn't enough room on the roster or on stage? Yet they were able to stuff 26 people into a Mini Cooper.

I spent some time with Greenplum's CEO--now GM and SVP, Bill Cook and CTO Luke Lonergan before curtain call.  Smart people, riding the Big Data wave.  They will have two major challenges:  1. keeping the buzz going with EMC now that Isilon is the new Big Data player and 2.  finding and retaining people that can sell the solution.

EMC sells storage - a lot of storage.  A data warehouse appliance is a different sales pitch and requires skilled presales resources that understand the difference between OLTP and OLAP.  ESG Research indicated in its 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey that database administrators and application developers are among the top problematic shortage of existing skills and will be the same top IT staff hires in 2011.  Finding the right people that can articulate the value of a specialized workload appliance for data analytics with competition knocking at the door and with new flashy solutions like Isilon taking center stage at EMC, let the show begin.