Ode to Wimbledon

The Tech Wife enjoys playing and watching tennis, and last weekend, I was battling the stomach flu, so we spent some quality time watching the Wimbledon finals.  It was a great event - the Williams sisters facing off against each other before the sun rose here in California, Nadal and Federer battling each other between rain delays, and an ungodly amount of grunting, screaming, and other other 'noises' coming from participants every time they hit a shot.  During the extremely long men's final match, I tried to think of some witty IT and tennis parallels without much success.  However, during this past week, a few came to mind that are worthy of the bullets this week. 

• One has to be believe there were a few volleys between Diane Greene and Joe Tucci regarding the future plans of VMware (i.e., full spinoff) before the former decided to 'resign'.  Diane's  departure should not impact VMware customers although one has to believe a few loyal developers will follow her exit which could hurt the company's ability to innovate in the short term.
• Sun is doing its best to regain an 'Adavantage' in the JBOD storage and storage server market with its latest J-series and SunFire announcements.  The company has had its share of storage challenges, but it has made some progress with Thumper.
• Many customers are unaware of NEC as a storage systems and data protection solutions provider.  The company should be well known, but its participation in certain markets could be compared to an unranked player getting on a streak at Wimbledon and then sticking around as a contender for a while.  I am betting that the rest of 2008 and 2009 will be the year that NEC becomes more of a household name in the U.S. for its storage and data protection offerings.
• FTI served an ace with its recent acquisition of Attenex.  I have said multiple times that Attenex solved a real world problem in the electronic discovery process.  Now, the publicly traded risk management company will sell the technology directly to corporations and legal service providers.
• So far, no vendor has double faulted in reporting June earnings.  However, things are going to be very interesting for Q3.  Yes, this does matter to customers because they read the news and see what companies are on the way up and which ones are struggling.  Customers like to bet on winner and every quarter, Wall Street issues its vote and their say usually finds it way to customers' PCs (either from the vendor if its good or a competitor if its bad).