"I trust Joe with my life"
John Chambers spoke about trust at some length during the vBlock cloud computing announcement today. He is obviously trying to communicate something to his people. FWIW, Joe Tucci didn't have as much to say about it, but he did echo those sentiments.
The difficult part of what EMC and Cisco are trying to accomplish does not involve virtual technologies nearly as much as it involves the very real world of compensation. EMC is a company that is driven by goals tied to compensation. Their culture does not let anything get in the way of their goals. Whether you like it or not, it's what's made that company what it is today and it's a culture that was started by founder Dick Egan, long before Joe Tucci took the reigns, and it is ingrained at EMC.
Cisco is a different animal. Obviously they are aggressive too, but they do it differently. As Chambers said, 80% of what Cisco does is through partners - something very different from EMC. When Chambers mentioned that partners will get most of the revenue from vBlock, Tucci was silent. I don't believe Tucci believes this for a minute. The sales engagement process for this will be very interesting to watch. When the question was asked later about who will sell vBlock, Tucci's response was to say it will be figured out. That's probably why they are forming a joint venture - Acadia - to deal with the sales problems. But that doesn't mean the problems are resolved - they will simply be transferred elsewhere. The accounting on this should be interesting to say the least, but unlike EMC and Cisco, Acadia will be a private company.
Chambers also made the somewhat ironic comment, "Companies like to control their customers, that's wrong." While many would agree with that, I'm wondering if he is familiar with the measures taken in the storage industry to maintain account control. How far will EMC bend in maintaining account control to help their partner Cisco make sales of UCS servers? Probably not very far.
There is a lot of risk with vBlock for both EMC and Cisco. Certainly, its an opportunity for Cisco and EMC to expand their markets, but sharing is hard for companies with voracious appetites and flattening revenue streams.