Originating Author: Peter Burris
EMC's most recent announcement provides important paths to incremental storage platform benefits for users. However, to optimize these paths, users will have to aggressively execute multiple levels of negotiations over the next 3-6 months, at least. This is particularly critical as EMC has pre-announced thin provisioning which can be used as leverage to negotiate forward intermediate capacity and pricing plans in near-term contracts.
Storage operations, application operations, network operations, finance, legal, and procurement will play important, and complex roles. To achieve optimal results, these groups will have to act as coherently and uniformly as the EMC sales and service teams they'll encounter -- a significant expectation, given the quality and legendary discipline of EMC's sales organization. Treating the negotiations as a project can help, for it forces establishment of clear objectives, roles, haggling guidelines, and a range of acceptable results. As is true with all coordinated activities managed as a project, planning is key. Recruiting the right participation, forging the right set of responsibilities, and driving the behaviors is very difficult without good planning. Multiple sub-teams are likely to be required, one focused on hardware, one on software licensing, and one on maintenance/enhancement services. Given the ongoing growth rates of storage demand, the continuous introduction of new function, and the high switching costs between platform products, ensuring attractive forward-looking maintenance contracts are at least as important as contracts that focus more on acquisition.
Action Item: Sharpen your pencils, storage users, because EMC is riding into town with the best and brightest negotiators in the storage industry. While nothing in this announcement creates a procurement crisis (e.g., buy now or lose your turn), the EMC contracts set up over the next few quarters will shape the space of available storage options for the next few years.
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