EMC and Open Source sitting in a tree

“If you don’t like change….you are going to like irrelevance even less” As I’ve mentioned in prior blog posts, that’s a phrase I use in just about every meeting, presentation and blog to describe the fast-paced, ever-changing world of IT.  It can also be used to describe the incredible amount of change happening inside EMC.  If you’ve only cursory kept up with some of the “behind the scenes” changes you’ll notice that EMC is literally morphing at equally breakneck speeds to remain relevant to our customers needs and desires. 

One of the big pushes we are seeing from our customers is around support and embracing of Open Source solutions.  If you are looking for a great book to read, check out “The New Kingmakers, How developers conquered the world”.  You’ve got to love the first chapter’s title “The CIO is the last to know” as it relates to the use and proliferation of Open Source solutions in their infrastructure.  Most of these solutions being deployed and managed by the development team.  The book is a really short read, and if nothing more it’ll give you some insight into what’s possibly happening in other peoples companies, because I’m sure it’s not happening in yours  

So what does this all mean for companies like EMC?  it means we need to embrace the fact that there is a sort of bifurcation of IT going on inside of our customer’s organizations.  On one side, there is the legacy applications, use cases, and solutions to meet these needs.  In a lot of cases, these are the groups that are having some serious downward pressure on budget and resources.  On the other side of IT are the Developers.  They are the ones being tasked with new customer facing applications, new initiatives around Hadoop, Object and BigData/DataLakes and they don’t seem to be hurting for budget money.  That probably has to do with the fact that a lot of their development can be done using Open Source tools and solutions.  Its also why are seeing strong declines in revenue from companies that sell legacy applications like Oracle etc.  These developers are doing these sorts of things on Open Source platforms.

This brings us to the EMC launch of the CODE group.  CODE stands for “Code Open, Deploy Everywhere” as well as Community Onramp for Developer Enablement.  Chad Sakac wrote “First EMC{code} #DevHigh5 Winners” He talked about why this is important to EMC and announced some of the winners of the DevHigh5 Awards.  Brian Carpenter (@InTheDC) wrote:  EMC{code} – What’s in the {}? in which he goes into more detail about how you can participate and the sorts of things we are looking for.  Both paint a pretty great picture of the focus of EMC going into 2015.

I can probably summarize with this.  For those that have been sitting on the sidelines, talking about Old/Slow/Legacy EMC, allow this to be yet another example of the crazy amount of changes taking place inside the hallowed walls.  Gone are the days of business units driving the behavior of the field and EMC as a whole.  EMC{code} is another great example of the change in behavior of EMC and one of the reasons I celebrated my 4th year with EMC in November !!  Looking forward to another 4 years (or longer) !

@vTexan