Nearly finished my first quarter at VCE…

Ever been on a British beach in winter?

Did you lean toward the on-shore gale, arms out-stretched as in a crucifix, with the wind whipping your hair and your eyes moistening with sea spray?  Ears hurting with the noise, the pressure, the cold?  Isn’t it FUN?!  I love it!

I’m nearing the end of my first quarter at VCE and has it been like body surfing in a storm.  I’m running a team of vArchitects in Europe that focus on service providers, and it is awesome.  I’m lucky to work with great people, there’s even a few ex-Loudclouders in here!  What are we doing at VCE?

Before VCE came along with their Vblock product, it was really hard, slow and expensive to deploy converged infrastructure: I know, because I’ve done several big ones and many small ones in my life at VMware and Cisco prior to VCE.  Why is it different at VCE?

Sit down with me and we can create a bill of materials from your requirements in less than 15 minutes.  If you press the Buy Now button then thirty days later it will be shipped to your datacenter loading bay on one or more pallets instead of hundreds of little boxes.

Then a VCE guy turns up in a taxi and in one day will have the whole thing running for you.  The day after that you can do your testing and launch your services and start making money.  Time to value and time to cash after making these kind of investments is what keeps the senior managers awake at night.

What goes on top of a Vblock though?  If you want a solution, VCE will take the lead and bring together some powerful functionalities and product sets so you don’t have to.  Watch this space for Trusted Multitenancy (TMT) including the market leading products from VMware, RSA, EMC, Cisco.  We just built this for a customer, from scratch, with no kit, to a fully functioning trusted multitennant Infrastructure-as-a-Service including VMmark2 (!) in less than four weeks.

And that, my friends, is why I work with Service Providers at VCE because you know what, it’s not really about a Vblock (we’ve solved that bit, let’s all move on now).  It’s about how you integrate it and run solutions on it to increase your margins and adopt new lines of revenue.  To quote one of my esteemed colleagues: It’s not about the hardware, it’s about the software.  We can only say that, though, because we have hundreds of engineers working thousands of hours to solve the hardware problem.  If you don’t do Vblock, you still have the hardware challenges to overcome.  Bon chance, mon ami.

What would the business prefer?  To be earning revenue from your new infrastructure in sixty days, or be still sitting in a room looking at a whiteboard and still doing the low level design and still working out which product firmware is compatible?  Been there, done that, now it’s up there with ITIL for me.  It is of value only to the professional services teams that charge customers for it.  It’s boring.  It’s dead, dead, dead.

I’ve been saying it since 2004 but I’ll say it again:  it’s not about provisioning, it’s about consumption.  If you spend 80% of your time talking about which SFP+ goes from here to there, then you are dead in the water.  VCE has done all that so you don’t have to.  We let you turn lots of knobs to get the performance and capacity you need, such as different RAID groups, but other than that we’d like to talk about something more interesting.

Like… how are you going to make money out of this thing?  And guess what?  VCE has some ideas to help you with that too.

I’ll be sharing these thoughts, such as In, With and On a Vblock, and topics like TMT and Service Creation over the coming weeks and months.