From viral spam to virulent sham

The twitterverse is busy again today with discussions surrounding EMC's us of spambots to generate views of videos they are trying to make viral.  If you are interested in seeing what is being said, check out these people's tweets and you'll be off on a trip down a dark hole. 

@johnful,    @dvellante,    @sfoskett,    @valb00,    @furrier

Here are a couple cartoons I made about it last week from my new cartoon, Ineption:

Netapp's Val Bercovici suggest this viral spamming as the end of innocence in social media, but innocence exited the social media stage long ago. 

I'm much more concerned about how large companies like EMC can use social media to suggest product and customer relationships that stretch the truth well beyond the impressions that a reader might take away from reading suggestive blog posts from respected corporate voices. As "unofficial company statements" that are more influential than press releases, social media pieces can distort things in a way that more-accountable corporate marketing are not allowed to.

Last week, Chad Sakac and Chuck Hollis published blog posts that pointed to an EMC white paper about details of a VMAX implementation at Terremark, an excellent 3PAR customer.  Readers of these posts would probably think that VMAX was being used as the storage behind Terremark's multi-tenant,  Enterprise Cloud service offering.  That would be stretching things more than just a little bit.  I commented on both blogs and the responses to my comments were interesting.  I guess I feel a little kinder towards Chad as a result. 

It is possible that somewhere in the world, a VMAX is being used by Terremark.  One would expect Terremark to be looking at various storage platforms as a matter of course, it only makes sense for them. After all, VMware made a significant investment in Terremark last year and we all know who owns VMware. There are certain favors that EMC can ask that vendors such as 3PAR can't. But Terremark also has to operate Enterprise Cloud in their US major data centers every day and the storage they use for that is not in a test lab - it's production - and it is 3PAR storage. 

And its not for lack of trying on EMC's part.  Last November when VCE was announced, Terremark was discussed as a featured customer in both Chad's and Chuck's blogs.  That was OK,  I understand the excitement that surrounds a big announcement.  But nine months later, to suggest that this announcement had given birth to a major production environment for a service that it is not supporting sort of stuck in my craw.

Here is a video I made at VMworld with Jason Lochhead, CTO of Hosting Solutions at Terremark last year where he talks about vCloud Express and Enterprise Cloud.  Very cool offerings and definitely on the leading edge of VMware-based service offerings.

It's not a viral video, but it has a lot more to say about what people care about than the videos EMC has been chasing with spambots.

Comments

[VMDoug]

Nice post and accompanying video...proof is where it's at.

[nate]

Speaking of Terremark and partners, I found it funny they have the Intel logo on their site yet a good chunk of their infrastructure is powered by AMD. Last time I talked to them they had two tiers of clusters, dual socket systems were Intel quad socket systems were AMD. The VMs I have with them are running on their AMD cluster(s). I don't know what kind of storage the VMs are connected to, since that is abstracted, they can't hide the CPU manufacturer from me though!

[Steve]

You are still my video hero Mr. Farley!