Last week, EMC sent minor shockwaves through the cloud-based computing community with this post claiming no plans to support a direct offering of Atmos Online, its highly-scalable network-based storage service. A number of skeptical analysts got a few licks in regarding the vulnerability of enterprise IT decisionmakers to business discontinuities when services in-the cloud can be altered so frivolously. The net effect of the clumsily-worded posting is that Atmos Online is now available for free as an unsupported product, making it something of a “try-before-you-buy” utility, which can then be purchased from a short-list of large service providers, including AT&T, CBICI, Hosted Solutions, Peer1 and Unisys (as described in this two-month-old news release.

As asymmetrical marketing specialist Joe Bentzel notes on his new Cloudwagon blog, EMC has another “family of products” carrying the VMWare brand, that position it to be the “poster child” for the next generation of software superpowers. EMC well-knows that its success both in virtualized storage and application orchestration depends on how well it works with others, as well as the opportunities it creates for its partners whose main lines of business are application development and integration. Joe calls the new area of opportunity “Superpower 2.0”. As I’ll be pointing out in the coming months and years, it is also fertile ground for Recombinant Communications, mostly because a the approach taken by EMC, both through Atmos and VMWare provide the level of flexibility and agility required for successful RC implementations.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Cloud Computing, Cloud Telephony, VMWare, EMC